Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 11:31:03 -0400
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: Abuse of children (was: Cockburn?)


At 4:38 AM 3/18/96, Hans Ehrbar wrote:

>(1) Some people on this list expressed interest in discussing
>psychoanalysis from a Marxist perspective.  A good opener would be
>Alice Miller's critique of Freud: early on he noticed an appaling
>extent of child abuse, but since this was (and still is) such a social
>taboo, he caved in and said that it was all in his patients'
>imagination, and in his drive theory he basically blames the victims
>for wanting to be victimized.  Psychoanalysis is wrong because the
>therapist, who does not have to courage to face his own childhood
>traumas, and who wants to feel powerful in helping his patients
>because he is powerless to help himself, tells the patients they have
>to forgive their parents in order to become well.

Explaining Naziism through recourse to Hitler's childhood is a parody of
psychoanalysis. Links between psyche and culture - or, as the rebel
bourgeois Freud put it, how one comes to an ego ideal appropriate to one's
family, class, and nation - are an insufficently explored area. But lots
more work needs to be done than what Miller did, at least in the passages
of hers I read.

To say that Freud turned away from his initial belief in the stories of
incest to a "blaming the victim" approach is to banalize psychoanalysis
completely. What people turn away from is Freud's discovery of infantile
sexuality, the plasticity of the human psyche, and the powerful role of
fantasy. Children have wild desires and fantasies, though we (especially
Americans) love to pretend they're pure & innocent. The revival of literal
incest theories, thanks in part to Jeff Masson and his current squeeze,
Catherine MacKinnon, has had disastrous consquences of persecution; a whole
industry of abuse professionals, who coach children into giving
preposterous accounts of torment at their hands of teachers and child care
providers, has led to the indictment and jailing of scores of innocent
people.

Freud's separation of psychoanalysis from biology and literal biography is
intellectually important and full of liberatory potential. His Three Essays
on Sex show that there's no "normal" human personality, no inevitable
heterosexuality, and that we're all quite kinked under our often placid
exteriors. Someone more ambitious than I might want to join this to Engels'
analysis of the family to produce a radical Freudo-Marxist critique of both
property and propriety.


Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217
USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice
+1-212-874-3137 fax
email: <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>




     --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---