Freud as Charlatan and Politician

‘I’ve never done a mean thing.’ —Freud

I’ve spent my whole life battling guilt and all those words that psychoanalysis has drilled into our heads. —David Cooper [1]

Readers may have noticed that I have sometimes used the terms psychiatrist and psychoanalyst interchangeably. Before reading Jeffrey Masson, I believed they were essentially different things. It’s true that I had experience with Giuseppe Amara, who appears in the Mexican media as a psychoanalyst but acts as a psychiatrist when faced with family problems. But even so, I believed they were fundamentally different.

I was wrong. Now I know that from its origins, psychoanalysis has been linked to psychiatry, and that in North America many analysts, like Amara, were both physicians and psychiatrists. Sigmund Freud himself, who began his career as an electrotherapist, flourished thanks to an amalgamation of his system with psychiatric approaches.

Eugen Bleuler, the psychiatrist who coined the term schizophrenia, published the first psychoanalytic journal with Freud. Psychiatrists were among Freud’s earliest followers. Ludwig Binswanger and Jung, from Bleuler’s group and representatives of mainstream psychiatry in Europe, began associating with Freud in 1907. Karl Abraham, a psychiatrist from Zurich, founded the most structured psychoanalytic society in Berlin. At the first psychoanalytic congress, Abraham and Jung presented papers on dementia praecox, now known as schizophrenia, which Freud listened to favourably. Max Eitingon, also a young psychiatrist, was Freud’s first translator into English. Across the Atlantic, the American psychiatrist Stanley Hall invited Freud to the United States, where Clark University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1909. This marked the beginning of the dissemination of Freud’s ideas in North America.

Freudian ideas are part of our cultural matrix: repressed memories, sexual sublimation, phallic symbols, castration anxiety, etc. I cannot delve into an examination of psychoanalytic theory. I will focus on those aspects of Freud’s biography in which his personality is compromised with the ideological system he created.

*   *   *

Freud wrote: ‘I consider ethics to be a given. In truth, I’ve never done a mean thing.’[2] To verify such extraordinary claim, it is more illuminating to read his correspondence with close friends than the official version of his life found in the hagiographies of his disciples. In his correspondence with Eduard Silberstein, his childhood friend, the young Freud wrote: ‘…whom nature has also inclined to be vain, a combination often found in girls.’[3] As can be seen in the insightful essays of F. Roger Devlin, or the internet texts by incels, this proved to be true. Where I believe Freud terribly erred was in believing that women literally envied men’s penises.

Freud’s career as a therapist began horribly. When Pauline, Silberstein’s wife, became depressed in 1891, Silberstein sent her to Freud. For unknown reasons, Pauline jumped from the fourth floor, where Freud had his office. Although some try to defend Freud by arguing that Pauline jumped without having met him yet, it should be noted that Freud never spoke about the case.[4] But I have my conjectures. Did Freud re-traumatize Pauline because of her marital problems with his old buddy? Did the young woman suffer a suicidal panic during the consultation due to re-traumatization? (I remember what Amara did to me when I was a teenager and how I left his office in a panic walking through Parque Hundido.)

It is well known that, as far as family politics were concerned, Freud sided with husbands in conflict with their wives. Similarly, like Kraepelin and Bleuler, Freud found it difficult to side with the children and easy to side with the parents. For example, the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing was displeased by a letter he received from a nineteen-year-old girl, Nina R., stating that she had erotic dreams. He wrote to Freud accusing her of suffering from ‘psychic masturbation.’ In 1891, the year Pauline threw herself from Freud’s apartment, Freud wrote:  ‘Nina R. has always been overexcited, full of romantic ideas, thinks her parents do not like her. Has the occasional fantasy that her father does not love her. The patient does nothing but read and write’ (this somewhat echoes Amara’s diagnosis). Two years later, Freud wrote to Dr Binswanger about this same young woman: ‘The inborn crookedness of her character manifested itself in her forgetting her immediate duties, her adjustment to her milieu, while she strove to gain interests on a more idealistic level and absorb more exalted intellectual stimuli.’[5] Freud went so far as to send some women to the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in the 1890s.[6]

In his first book, Studies on Hysteria, which he published with Josef Breuer, Freud wrote about other women. Breuer, who had obtained these patients for Freud, had been a paternal figure. In the 1880s, when Freud was still an unknown and relatively poor doctor, Breuer paid him monthly sums of money. Although he didn’t always agree with Freud’s interpretations of women in the book they published together, he expressed his differences very cautiously and respectfully toward his protégé. That was enough for the disciple to repudiate his teacher and never speak to him again for the rest of his life. Josef Breuer was deeply hurt by Freud’s disproportionate reaction. Hanna, Breuer’s daughter-in-law, recounts something that happened many years later: ‘How profoundly this break must have affected my father-in-law can be guessed from a small but significant incident that occurred when he was already an old man. He was walking down the street in Vienna when he suddenly saw Freud coming toward him. Intuitively, he opened his arms. Freud walked past him pretending not to have seen him.’[7]

This is how Freud repaid the most protective person in his life. Later, Adler, Stekel, Jung, Rank and Ferenczi, like Breuer, fell out of Freud’s favour for the same reason: they didn’t adhere to each and every Freudian doctrine. If Freud behaved this way with his protector and disciples, how must he have behaved with his defenceless patients? Besides the suicide of Pauline Silberstein, it is known for certain that Freud endangered the life of another of his patients: Emma Eckstein.

In 1895, when Freud saw that Emma wasn’t recovering from her hysteria, he summoned Wilhelm Fliess. Psychoanalysts often omit mentioning, when speaking of their mentor, that Fliess, Freud’s best friend, was ‘one of the giants of German crackpottery.’[8] Fliess was convinced that neuroses were related to the nose, so he would remove a piece of a nasal bone from his ‘severe’ patients. During the ten years of Fliess’s friendship with Freud, the latter accepted his friend’s crackpottery as genuine science. In fact, Freud even called his friend ‘the new Kepler’ for his discoveries in the field of otolaryngology. So Fliess, the new Kepler, operated on Emma.

After the operation Fliess returned to Berlin, but the young woman began to bleed uncontrollably. Alarmed, Freud took her to a real surgeon who reopened her nose and found a piece of iodized gauze that Fliess had left behind during the operation. The gauze had prevented the wound from healing properly. Although she healed after the surgeon treated her, Emma was left with a permanent disfigurement, a cavity in her cheek. However—and this is the important point—Freud interpreted what happened to Emma Eckstein in such a way that he exonerated the irresponsible quack. In one of his letters, Freud wrote to Fliess:

You were right that her episodes of bleeding were hysterical, were occasioned by longing, and probably occurred at the sexually relevant times (the woman, out of resistance, has not yet supplied me with the dates).[9]

Freud concluded: ‘As far as the blood is concerned, you are completely without blame!’[10] That business about dates was part of Fliess’s quackery, who, like an astrologer, made associations between dates and menstrual periods to predict women’s destinies. But what interests us is Freud’s interpretation. I can’t think of a better example to show how, despite the more than obvious evidence of Fliess’s guilt, in a conflict between people, the psychoanalyst exonerates his buddy, and the way to do so is by blaming the victim. I call this revictimization.

The analytical interpretation Freud applied to Emma, ​​‘hysterical haemorrhage,’ wasn’t a slip of the tongue in his correspondence with Fliess. In his most important work, The Interpretation of Dreams, he dedicates sixteen pages to the Emma case, using the pseudonym ‘Irma’: the longest analytical topic in The Interpretation. Freud confesses there that he had a dream about Irma (that is, Emma Eckstein). It is not relevant to transcribe it here. What is important is that, according to Freud, the dream was his own unconscious’s declaration of innocence regarding the accusation of medical error and, as Freud’s self-analysis continues, the dream blamed several people: Emma/Irma for not accepting his interpretation, Breuer, and another doctor who appeared in his dream. It is an exquisite irony that a work many consider seminal for unearthing the truth of the human mind—incidentally, The Interpretation of Dreams is Amara’s favourite book—begins by misrepresenting what Freud and Fliess did to Emma. To add insult to injury, in the year of the operation that disfigured Emma, ​​Freud wrote a letter to Fliess asking if the house where he had the dream about Emma would one day bear a marble plaque with a lapidary inscription, in Freud’s own words:

Here, on July 24, 1895,
the secret of the dream was revealed
to Dr Sigmund Freud. [11]

Ten years later, in 1905, Freud wrote to Emma and brought up the subject of Fliess’s botched operation again. One might assume that after so many years, the great connoisseur of the human soul would have examined his conscience and regretted what he and his buddy had done to her. This was not the case. In the letter, Freud continued to accuse her of believing that her problem was physical and that another doctor had cured her. Incredibly, Freud reiterated that Emma’s ‘resistance’ to his interpretation was responsible for his ‘psychoanalysis’ not having been successful. [12]

Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess in 1890.

The most serious blunder in Freud’s career, one that would wreak havoc not on a couple of women but on how his followers treated their clients throughout the 20th century, was his repudiation of one of his discoveries.

At the end of the 19th century, Freud had noticed that some women who consulted him suffered from memories of having been raped by their fathers: something that went down in history as ‘the seduction theory.’ In 1896 Freud wrote an article on the subject, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria.’ Jeffrey Masson suggests that, seeing that these revelations only alienated him from his colleagues in a Vienna incapable of putting the respected fathers on the dock, Freud, much like the psychiatrists, reversed his ideology and decided to blame the victims. Freud labelled them ‘hysterical’ and defined hysteria as a hidden desire to be seduced. It is now known that incest has occurred more frequently than was accepted in 19th-century Europe, but this reversal of blame was to be the cornerstone upon which Freud would build his edifice. For psychoanalysis, the year 1897 marks both the abandonment of Freud’s seduction theory (if you say your father molested you…) and the ‘discovery’ of the Oedipus complex (…it means you were actually fantasizing about it).

In 1900 Freud saw Ida Bauer for the first time, whom he called ‘Dora’. Mr. K., an industrialist and friend of Dora’s dad, tried to seduce her twice: the first time when she was just thirteen-year-old and the second time when she was fifteen. Mr. K. forcibly kissed her on the mouth and Dora responded ‘with a vivid sense of disgust.’[13] When the girl reported the situation her father wanted to take her to a doctor. Dora refused: all she wanted was to be vindicated against Lolita’s harasser. But eventually, she relented.

In a session with Freud, the seventeen years old Dora told him her story. Since her father hadn’t supported her, perhaps Dr Freud would. Freud listened to her for several sessions and, unlike her father, believed her story. But he did something more. The following is a quote from an article in which Freud confesses what he told Dora in their consultation:

You will agree that nothing makes you so angry as having it thought that you merely fancied the scene by the lake [the place of the seduction]. I know now—and this is what you do not want to be reminded of—that you did fancy that Mr K.’s proposals were serious, and that he would not leave off until you had married him.[14]

This is one of the sins that analysts commit daily. Right now, one of them is ‘interpreting’ the mind of one of their unsuspecting clients in a manner as capricious as this. Another example is how Amara interpreted my running away to my grandmother’s house as a result of feeling insecure before my siblings. When Freud interpreted her as being in love with a man three times her age, and as having felt disgusted when Mr. K. tried to kiss her being ‘hysterical’—Freud assumed that if Dora were normal, she would have responded with pleasure—, the girl didn’t challenge him. She said goodbye to the Vienna quack and never set foot in his office again.

Freud took his revenge by devising the theory that if someone disagreed with the analyst’s interpretation, it was simply due to a lack of insight, a refusal to confront her own psychological reality. This overinterpretation, elevated to a doctrine in psychoanalysis, he christened ‘resistance’: a concept he had already used in the case of Emma Eckstein. For Freud and psychoanalysts, this word means that, once the analyst has made an interpretation, the case is closed: everything else is ‘resistance.’ Let us listen once more to Freud:

We must not be led astray by initial denials. If we keep firmly to what we have inferred, we shall in the end conquer every resistance by emphasizing the unshakable nature of our convictions.[15]

Then Freud adds that ‘this conviction has become so absolute in me…’

This is the language of the dogmatist, not of the student of the mind, much less of the mind of another person. What Freud really wanted was for Dora to fall into a state of folie à deux with him (as I fell into it with Amara when he prevented me from stopping my appointments). Freud not only failed to apologize to Dora for the stupid thing he had said about Mr. K., but he elevated his foolish interpretation to the level of science, employing all the literary resources of his intellect. Freud’s essay on Dora, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, is the most extensive clinical history in Freud’s legacy and the most cited work on female ‘hysteria.’ In Fragment of an Analysis Freud dared to interpret Dora’s cough as an expression of her desire to perform fellatio on Mr. K., and he also interpreted two of her dreams along those same sexual lines. Obviously, the teenager’s disagreement with such interpretations constituted ‘resistance.’ Not content with that, Freud also used the Dora case to develop the famous doctrine of ‘transference.’ Let us read Freud once more:

…those indications that make a transference onto me plausible. … I conclude that in one of the treatment sessions, the patient [Dora] decided she wanted me to kiss her. [16]

Freud deluded himself into believing that a young woman in her prime wanted to be kissed not only by Mr. K. but by him as well. In one of the few good biographies written about Freud, the analyst Louis Breger states that it was clear that the therapy Freud applied to Dora was quite harmful, and that it was painful to read the case today.[17] The harmful therapy appears in the excellent Mexican play Feliz Nuevo Siglo Doktor Freud (Happy New Century, Dr. Freud ) by Sabina Berman. Berman’s comedy, which I thoroughly enjoyed and which was even performed in Spain, deals precisely with what has been said here about Freud and Dora.

I wonder how someone like Freud ended up in history as an astute observer of the mind. Because analysts continue to follow Freudian doctrines, they have tarnished Dora’s image for a century without ever having met her. Masson tells us that famous analysts like Ernest Jones, Félix Deutch, Jacques Lacan and even feminists like Toril Moi have spoken of Dora with contempt. Jenny Pavisic, a Lacanian analyst, told me personally: ‘Dora was a hysteric who—.’ In other words, the folie à deux of the true believers of Freud’s ideas continues. In reality, Dr Freud blamed Dora to absolve the industrialist and blamed Emma to absolve his buddy: antecedents of what, three-quarters of a century later, Amara would do to me: blame me to absolve my parents. Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries Freud’s followers have blamed countless Doras, Emmas, and Césares.

At the end of the 19th century, in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud confessed that, due to his essay on seduction, in which he discussed incest among the middle and upper classes, ‘the word has been given out to abandon me and I am isolated.’[18] Masson believes that Dora’s case vindicated him. His new theory of hysteria represented a complete reversal of his previous position. Now Freud no longer targeted powerful industrialists like Mr. K., but a defenceless young woman. Freud’s behaviour was in line with psychiatry: siding with parents and the wealthy classes against their victims. From this perspective, it is no exaggeration to say that psychoanalysis was founded on the betrayal of women and adolescents in early 20th-century Vienna.

The Dora case and the abandonment of his seduction theory are not venial sins of the founder of psychoanalysis. They invalidate two pillars of the Freudian edifice: the notion of hysteria and the famous Oedipus complex. But Freud also used his prestige to side with parents in conflicts with adolescent boys. This is evident in his own writings. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud recounts that a mother asked him to examine her son. Freud noticed a stain on his trousers, and the adolescent told him he had dropped an egg. Freud didn’t believe the story and spoke with the mother privately: ‘I… took as the basis of our discussion his confession that he was suffering from the troubles arising from masturbation.’[19] The point of the anecdote, and I owe this to Thomas Szasz, is that the boy wasn’t suffering from anything at all: it was an ignorant mother who was worried about her son’s emerging sexuality. Freud saw something as normal as adolescent ejaculation as ‘psychopathological.’ Whether it was due to masturbation or not, much like Catholics taking their children to confession, the boy’s emission warranted a whole medical ceremony culminating in a formal diagnosis.

This was not another hypothetical isolated slip of Freud’s. Throughout his life he shared the Victorian hysteria surrounding masturbation: real hysteria, not the ‘hysteria’ of Emma and Dora that harmed no one. Freud believed that masturbation was a very serious matter. He wrote to Fliess that masturbation was the ‘primary addiction’ from which all others arose, including addiction to morphine and homosexuality.[20] We are so accustomed to seeing Freud as the pioneer in the courageous revelation of human sexuality that it is difficult for us to see him for what he was: an exponent of the morality of his time. In fact, he didn’t tell his own children how babies came into the world but sent them to the family doctor to have it explained. The most fascinating anecdote I know on this subject is something told by Oliver Freud, one of Freud’s sons.

When Oliver was sixteen, he asked his father for advice about masturbation. The boy hoped the renowned physician of the human soul would free him from guilt. Freud did the opposite: he warned him against masturbating. In Oliver’s own words, he was ‘quite upset for some time.’[21] Louis Breger comments that Oliver had the feeling that his father’s censure had erected a barrier that prevented communication between them.[22] Years later, Oliver would be the Freud child who distanced himself most from the family. What better example to portray the real Freud, the creator of an all-encompassing theory that revolved around human eroticism? The man who founded the profession of listening to those who needed to talk about their sexuality didn’t listen to his own son!

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Now I will address Freud’s stance on the political realities of his time.

The First World War was the greatest catastrophe Europe experienced at the beginning of the century. It violently awakened people from the optimistic dream of unstoppable 19th-century progress. Never before had millions died in a single war. The war not only killed and disabled many soldiers during combat, but the emotional aftermath was also felt by their wives and families.

Freud was at the height of his intellectual powers when the conflict erupted. Initially, he embraced the nationalism of the time and even told a disciple, ‘All my libido is for Austria-Hungary.’[23] Freud’s euphoria cooled, as did that of his compatriots, when the stark realities of the war and the death toll began to emerge. I cannot elaborate on the details, but I will mention Freud’s stance toward the thousands of traumatized soldiers who survived the fighting. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory was the first movie to portray the hell of trench warfare in the First World War, including the psychological trauma of some soldiers, which in Freud’s time was termed ‘war neurosis.’ For some English and French doctors—and this is not a movie but true history—it was obvious that these traumas were caused by their experiences in the war. Currently, the term PTSD is used in some cases of veterans of the Vietnam War and the Gulf Wars.

Freud, on the other hand, was blind to the obvious. In his contribution to the monograph Psychoanalysis and the War Neurosis he wrote that the soldiers’ mental disorders had a purely sexual origin, and his close disciples seconded him. Josef Breuer, despite his advanced age during the war, helped to medically treat some of the survivors. His philanthropic attitude contrasts sharply with that of Freud, who never treated a single soldier. Freud was content to draw his conclusions directly from his theories. For Freud, these theories were laws of nature, and from them it was possible to deduce everything related to human behaviour. If Freudian theory was based on the axiom of human sexuality, then all neuroses, including ‘war neurosis,’ must necessarily have a sexual aetiology. A single case will suffice to illustrate Freud’s position. In 1919, Lou Andreas-Salomé, one of Freud’s most famous disciples, wrote to Freud about the case of a soldier whose twin brother had died in the war. Neither Andreas-Salomé nor Freud paid any attention to the loss. Under Freud’s guidance, Andreas-Salomé conducted the ‘analysis’ of the surviving twin around classic Freudian doctrines such as latent homosexuality, the Oedipus complex, and fixation on the paternal figure. [24]

The Freudian interpretation is as capricious as the interpretations of Emma and Dora or Amara’s interpretation of my running away to my grandmother’s house. But Freud was guilty of more than just a theoretical stance. The founder of psychoanalysis not only sided with powerful individuals in conflict with young women, but also with the State in conflict with soldiers.

The German psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg administered painful electric shocks during World War I to young men who wanted to leave the military. After the war, some of those treated in the psychiatric division of Vienna General Hospital, run by Wagner-Jauregg, complained, and in 1920 a commission was appointed to investigate the charges. The commission asked Freud for his opinion. Freud defended Wagner-Jauregg. And not only that: He insisted on calling the soldiers who accused the renowned doctor ‘patients’ and on referring to their fear as an ‘illness.’ The commission ruled in favour of Wagner-Jauregg. Because Freud was a man convinced of his own righteousness and believed he had never done anything mean, he never regretted what he had done to the young soldiers.[25]

I emphasize that these weren’t isolated sins in the biographies of Freud and Jung. In the entire vast body of work of these psychologists, there is not a single critical line regarding involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Since Jung learned his trade at the Burghölzli Hospital in Zurich under Bleuler’s supervision, he was familiar with the neologism his boss coined: schizophrenia. On one occasion, Freud played the accomplice in Bleuler and Jung’s prison-like psychiatry. On May 16, 1908, Freud wrote to Jung:

Enclosed the certificate for Otto Gross. Once you have him, don’t let him out before October, when I shall be able to take charge of him.[26]

This smells like the mafia. Gross himself was a doctor who, ironically, that same year published a letter to an editor objecting to a girl’s involuntary commitment by her father. On June 17, Gross escaped from the Burghölzli. Jung retaliated by labelling him ‘schizophrenic.’ Freud enthusiastically accepted the diagnosis.[27]

In 1975, the Mexican Social Security Institute convened an international conference on psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Mexico City, in which Tom Szasz participated along with other European and Latin American psychiatrists and analysts. At a roundtable discussion, Szasz confronted his colleagues. He told them what he thought about lobotomist doctors and psychiatrists:

The other conclusion is that they are gangsters, butchers, criminals, and delinquents. That is my conclusion. And I would add that people like Freud are also sympathetic to these butchers, since for forty years he never pointed out that this was wrong. And this was happening right next door. He behaved like one of those Germans who, when the Jews were in the gas chambers, claimed not to smell anything. And finally, my conclusion is that Freud and Jung, especially Freud—who had many good ideas and was very intelligent—was basically a gangster, because he wasn’t interested in studying anything scientifically. He was only interested in building what he called the psychoanalytic movement.

Words are very important. Galileo didn’t have a movement. Darwin didn’t have a movement. Mendel didn’t have a movement. Einstein didn’t have a movement. Freud claimed to be a scientist, but since he needed a movement, this makes him a politician. The only question left is: do you like Freud as a politician or not? I find him detestable.[28]

The analysts who shared the roundtable with Szasz didn’t respond to these criticisms: that throughout his career Freud remained silent about the psychiatric crimes in the house next door. Igor Caruso and Marie Langer offended him, and Szasz had to leave the discussion.[29] But the important thing to emphasize is that these learned figures in psychoanalysis didn’t respond at all regarding Freud’s indifference to the crime. They had nothing to say.

Not only did Freud lack compassion for the victims of world war and psychiatric confinement but, like his mentor Charcot, when referring to the women persecuted by the Inquisition, he spoke of them as ‘hysterics.’ This is one of the facts that most horrified me when reading Szasz’s classic, The Manufacture of Madness: Freud and his mentor didn’t speak of perpetrators but rather diagnosed the victims of the inquisitors. In his obituary for Charcot, Freud wrote:

By pronouncing possession by a demon to be the cause of hysterical phenomena, the Middle Ages in fact chose this solution; it would only have been a matter of exchanging the religious terminology of that dark and superstitious age for the scientific language of today.[30]

As Szasz pointed out, this is an extraordinary statement. Freud acknowledges that the psychoanalytic description of hysteria is merely a semantic revision of the demonological one! Freud wrote his note in 1893. In more recent times, there are psychiatrists and historians sympathetic to psychiatry who continue to spout the exact same nonsense. For example, in Nouvelle histoire de la psychiatrie, published in France in 1983, the editors Jacques Poster and Claude Quétel wrote a biographical note on Johann Christian Heinroth and the words he used. This 19th-century psychiatrist identified mental illness with sin. Poster and Quétel commented that Heinroth’s Lutheran vocabulary had been much criticized and had fallen into disuse in our time. But they immediately added: ‘However, if we substitute the notion of “sin” with that of “guilt,” many of his ideas acquire a curiously modern dimension.’[31] Another contributor, the Mexican psychiatrist Héctor Pérez Rincón, wrote: ‘One cannot speak of the history of psychiatry in New Spain without taking into consideration … the activity of the Inquisition in some behaviours that today would be classified as psychiatric.’[32] So, in a book published a century after Freud’s pronouncement, there are psychiatrists who continue to maintain that his Newspeak is merely a semantic revision of the Inquisition’s ideology.

In the 4th century, the stigmatizing labels were pagan and heretic. A thousand years later, there were no longer any Greco-Roman pagans—they had been exterminated by the Church—only heretics, but a new group emerged to be stigmatized: witches. In 1486, the Dominican theologians Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Krämer published the Malleus Maleficarum, literally the hammer of witches: the medieval manual that would become the ideological source of terror for countless women: an inhumane hunt that would last for centuries. The exact number of women murdered is unknown, but some estimates range from one hundred thousand to half a million. The last execution for ‘witchcraft’ took place in Poland in 1793. Incredibly, these victims of deranged Christians are not considered as such in the writings of psychiatrists. Following Charcot and Freud, psychiatrists speak of neuro-pathologies referring not to the inquisitors, but to their victims. Szasz observes that, for the historians of psychiatry Franz Alexander and Sheldon Selesnick, the fact that these women were tortured and burned was enough to make them, not their murderers, objects of medical interest. And what do psychiatrists say about the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum? Gregory Zilboorg, another historian of psychiatry, called them ‘two honest Dominicans.’ Similar words of admiration can be found in the writings of Jules Masserman, another psychiatrist.[33] Evidently these doctors, as arrogant as those medieval theologians, diagnose ‘psychopathologies’ centuries later, without having medically examined any of the women. I call this Wonderland Logic, alluding to Lewis Carroll’s story: the surrealism of punishing the victim and not the perpetrator.

The most relevant point in psychiatric Wonderland is that many psychiatrists today believe these official psychiatric narratives. Even students in the new century accept such narratives. For example, in his thesis for his undergraduate degree in psychology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2001, Guillermo Gaytan wrote: ‘Sprenger and Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, a book that can be considered a true treatise on psychopathology, also contained a good number of corrective measures.’ [34]

Corrective measures! Does the author approve of burning women at the stake? Fortunately, for historians who are not psychiatrists or psychologists, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, the witch hunts were clearly a paranoid enterprise of the Church. After the Enlightenment there is no excuse for viewing this chapter of history any other way. It doesn’t surprise me that an individual who labels the victim of fanatics as hysterical—Freud—treated some of his patients the way he did.

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[1] David Cooper, quoted in Francisco Gomezjara (ed.): “La otra psicología” in Alternativas a la psiquiatría y a la psicología social (México: Fontamara, 1989), p. 76. This dossier of articles published in various Mexican journals and newspapers was originally published in 1982. The edition I am referring to is the expanded 1989 edition.

[2] Freud to James Putnam, quoted by Ernest Jones. On page 153 of The Myth of Mental Illness (Harper & Row, 1974), Thomas Szasz quotes it in German (“Ich betrachte das Moralische als etwas Selbstverständliches… Ich habe eigentlich nie etwas Gemeines getan.‘‘).

[3] Quoted in Louis Breger: Freud: el genio y sus sombras (Javier Vergara, 2001), p. 71. The original title is Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (John Wiley & Sons, 2000).

[4] Ibid., (Spanish edition) p. 72.

[5] Cited in Masson: Against Therapy, p. 82.

[6] Ibidem.

[7] Hanna Breuer, cited in Breger: Freud, p. 174 (Spanish edition). The relationship between Josef Breuer and Freud is explained in three chapters of Breger’s book.

[8] Martin Gardner: ‘Freud and Fliess: The Sad Sage of Emma Eckstein’s Nose’ in Skeptical Inquirer (Summer 1984), p. 302.

[9] Ibid, p. 304.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, cited in Breger: Freud (Spanish edition) p. 196.

[12] I read this in ibidem, p. 511.

[13] Ibidem, p. 212.

[14] Masson: Against Therapy, p. 95.

[15] Quoted in Paul Gray, ‘The Assault on Freud’, Time (29 November 1993), p. 33.

[16] Breger: Freud (Spanish edition), p. 162.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Masson: Against Therapy, p. 104.

[19] Freud, cited in Szasz: The Manufacture of Madness, p. 195.

[20] I read several quotations of Freud to Fliess on masturbation in Szasz: Pharmacracy, pp. 102ff. See also The Manufacture of Madness, pp. 189-194.

[21] Oliver Freud, cited in Breger: Freud (Spanish edition), p. 375.

[22] Ibid. On pages 244ff, Breger writes about a different case in which Freud was open minded and didn’t condemn the masturbation of Albert Hirst, one of his patients. But Freud never mentioned the case in his writings: what is known is due to what Hirst himself recounted.

[23] Freud, cited in ibid., p. 305.

[24] Ibid., p. 339.

[25] Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Psychotherapy contains a chapter on Freud and electrotherapy.

[26] Szasz: Anti-Freud, pp. 135ff.

[27] These observations are taken from ibid., p. 136. A more detailed account of these events and the erratic story of Otto Gross appears in Richard Noll’s The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (Random House, 1997).

[28] Basaglia et al.: Razón, locura y sociedad, pp. 178ff (my translation).

[29] Ibid., pp. 179-184.

[30] Freud, cited in Szasz: The Manufacture of Madness, p. 73.

[31] Jacques Poster and Claude Quétel (eds.): “Diccionario biográfico” in Nueva historia de la psiquiatría (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), p. 652, my translation.

[32] Héctor Pérez-Rincón: “México” in ibid., p. 525, my translation.

[33] In the chapter ‘The Witch as Mental Patient’ from The Manufacture of Madness, Szasz presents the positions of Charcot, Freud, Zilborg and other physicians regarding the Inquisition.

[34] Guillermo Gaytan-Bonfil: El diagnóstico de la locura en el Manicomio General de La Castañeda (undergraduate thesis, Faculty of Psychology, UNAM, 2001), p. 3, my translation.