The Subconscious

 

Freud shows us his imaginary phallus

I have lost two of my best friends to psychiatry. 

The first, whom I had known since first year university, through think and thin, unfriended me emphatically in insult and anger when I questioned psychotherapy. To be clear, these were the words which he apparently found unforgivable:

“You believe you have been helped by psychotherapy. I admit that this is possible. Some people were helped by joining Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, too. But overall… not such a good idea. This may be an extreme example, but it makes the point. And I am not sure it is extreme, actually.”

My being concerned with his welfare was not held in my favour.

Another friend, whom I had cherished and admired for a good thirty years, unfriended me and declared me immoral for scoffing at Maslow and existentialist psychiatry. My argument was that they claimed depression was caused by a sense of meaninglessness, and then affirmed that there was indeed no meaning in life. So going to an existentialist therapist could not be helpful.

I cannot imagine any religious person having a similar reaction over a similar criticism of religion. Certainly not cutting off such longstanding friendships. Among the religious, it is the reverse: they are eager to discuss the issue. They will even knock on the doors of strangers in hopes of doing so.

So I must conclude that the average person who believes in psychiatry holds to his faith more fervently than if it were a religion.

This does not speak well of psychiatry, given that it claims to be scientific. It is obviously something else. Not religion; more like a cult.

As a general principle, if one believes one has the better argument, one enjoys an argument. If one suspects one’s beliefs are untenable, one will refuse to discuss them. Especially if there is something personal at stake.

I think this “true believer” phenomenon is a symptom of the incoherence of materialism. It is our dominant world view: we believe in “science.” But scientific materialism fails to account for the larger portion of human experience. If one is not a total zombie, one discovers this. And then what? Then depression or mental illness occurs: one is out of step with what “everyone knows” is true. At best, one is alienated. At worst, one concludes one is incurably insane. One is experiencing impossible things, things that do not exist.

Psychiatry rushes in as the attempt to reconcile one’s experience with materialism. And partly as Inquisition, rooting out heresies by declaring insanity. 

People then cling in desperation to their chosen psychology, because from their perspective, if they doubt the therapist, they go mad. 

In objective terms, however, it is the psychiatry that is making and keeping them mad.

My first friend accepted that Freud, the founder of psychiatry, was mostly wrong. Of course; he has, after all, been disproven in detail in scientific terms. However, Freud must still be honoured as the man who discovered the subconscious. The subconscious explains everything.

But the subconscious, or Jung’s similar “unconscious,” is actually nonsensical. It is a self that is not ourself, a will that is our will yet not our will, a consciousness of which we are not conscious. 

These are all contradictions in terms.

The obvious truth is that these strange messages or intimations or urges or images are not coming from us. Indeed, they are not by definition. There is a spiritual world. And it is no more a part of us than is the physical world.

There Is No Subconscious

 

Thanks to Freud, the concept of a “subconscious mind” has seeped into our culture. People even hail it as an important scientific discovery, similar to the law of gravity or theory of evolution. But the concept is self-contradictory.

It posits a part of self that is independent of self (“ego”). It posits a part of consciousness of which we are  not conscious. 

These characteristics are definitive of “other.” 

There is no subconscious mind.

The concept is constructed from our experience of memory. Memories emerge into consciousness from some unknown place, where they abide when we are not thinking of them. 

But before Freud muddied the waters, we had Plato’s concept of the ideal forms, the Buddhist concept of a “storehouse consciousness,” Coleridge’s “primary imagination.” Put simply, an objectively existing spiritual world. And this is the only coherent explanation.

The fact that memories continue to exist whether or not we or anyone are thinking of them, identifies them as not subjective, part of ourselves, but independent objects of consciousness. This is simply true by definition. Just as the fact that the corner lamppost seems to exist whether or not we are looking at it, demonstrates that it is not a part of us and our consciousness, but an independent object. 

If the memories we encounter seem by and large to be entirely personal, that does not make them a part of ourselves. Our sense experiences are also personal: we see only what is around us in space. They may be only a small part of a wider world, just as Africa exists, or Alpha Centauri, although we have never seen it.

But Freud actually finds that memories are not personal; in the house of memory, there seems to be wills operating independent of our own. The subconscious makes us think, say, even do things contrary to our will.

We always knew this too: these wills are the independent spiritual entities identified worldwide as angels, demons, fairies, gods. We know they exist on exactly the same evidence that we know other human or animal spirits exist, that the things we see are not all simply objects: because they are clearly not subject to our will, but follow their own wills.

Just to make the matter clearer, or more confusing if you hold to the Freudian formula, Jung has demonstrated that we are capable of remembering things we have never seen nor heard. Dragons, for example, unicorns, phoenixes, vampires, zombies, and so forth. These are not individual memories, and not individual “imaginings” either; for the same creatures and characters recognizably appear in myths, legends, and folk tales all around the world.

The Freudian “subconscious” is just an alibi, a spooky tale told at bedtime to frighten off further questioning, an attempt to explain away the spiritual aspect of existence, because it contradicts the materialistic dogmas of scientism. But the thesis itself violates all the basic tenets of science as well as philosophy. One of which is that one must go with the simplest explanation to account for the facts.

Which, in this case, is the existence of a spiritual dimension that exists independently of the material.

Was That Your Mother That I Saw You With Last Night?

 

Freud with phallic symbol.

According to Sigmund Freud, we all have a suppressed desire to have sex with our Mum. Or our father, if we are on the female side of the binary. And the evidence is that we tend to marry someone who physically resembles our parent of the opposite sex.

Except, no. Not me. My mother was short and blonde. I married two women, both with black hair. Both were taller than average, at least for their community. The thought of sex with a women who closely resembles my mother actually provokes feelings of disgust.

And what about those other Caucasian men taking Asian wives? Or those girls who for centuries have run off with the visiting sailor or the Italian piano teacher?

In fact, evolution should select for exogamy, and seems to. Similar genes are bad for the species: higher chance of a harmful mutation. So we instinctively desire someone unlike ourselves, or our parent, in appearance, and are instinctively repelled by incest. This is why opposites attract.

So when we have a strong sexual preference, like a preference for red hair, or for black men, where does it come from?

To some extent, no doubt, from this instinct for exogamy. But that does not seem enough. Either red hair or black hair would be fully different from my mother’s blonde hair. So why do I prefer black to red? Either Asian men or African men would be fully different in appearance from a European father; so why do North American women so often favour African men specifically?

I think we know why. When we hear of a fetish, we do often assume it comes from one’s first sexual experience. It has to do with the first person with whom you achieved orgasm. You see a woman with black hair, a check mark in the back of your mind. A little taller than average. Check. Foreign. Check. Approach with interest.

Humans are hardwired to be monogamous. We can posit this from evolution. Human children take a lot of time and investment to develop. Monogamy, two parents staying together, is the inevitable evolutionary strategy to preserve and advance the species. And so, as soon as we first have sex, we are imprinted, like a baby duck when it hatches and first sees its Mom.

Of course, we are not beings of instinct, like ducks. It is not that obvious, and can be superseded by other concerns. But a switch is tripped. We are meant to be with that first one for the rest of our lives.

When we recognize this, we can recognize the grave harm of the sexual revolution. We recognize why all societies but our own put a high value on female virginity. If your wife has had sex with someone else, you will always be number two. The bond and the commitment will never be complete. Sex for you or her will never be what it is supposed to be.

This is equally true for men, at least in emotional terms; but for men, there is no good way to tell. Men have no hymen.

Surely this is why evolution has produced the hymen; it is mildly dangerous, and painful. It seems to perform no other function. It is there as a seal and certification.

This also explains the traditional prohibition in most societies on homosexual sex.

We have been told gays are “born this way”; but this is evolutionarily impossible. Since homosexuals, barring exceptional measures, do not breed, a gay gene would be bred out in one or two generations.

No, people must become gay because their first orgasm was with some member of the same sex.

Older gays face extremely limited choices in sex partners. Ninety-eight percent of all adults who might appeal to you will reject your advance, perhaps angrily. That must be tough. The obvious strategy is to seduce some young person. A young person will not be fully aware of what is going on, and may not struggle. If they are repulsed, or complain, at least until recent years, nobody is likely to listen. If they listen, a young person may not understand well enough to lodge any complaints. They may even feel too guilty, not understanding what has happened.

The genetic programming to be attracted instead and only to the opposite sex must be quite strong. Evolution would make it so. Most of us are repulsed, not in the least attracted, to the thought of sex with another man or another woman. But if the first sexual encounters are with a same-sex partner, you now have another instinct, a sexual imprint, pulling you in the opposite direction. The longer and more intimate the initial relationship, the more likely the gay urge is to stay and grow.

Wise societies will therefore condemn homosexual sex, and perhaps pass laws against it. Homosexuality is contagious, every new gay means children not born, and that polis will decline over time.

And few citizens will want their own children to be made homosexual, for it means their own family line ends.

So where did Freud get the opposite idea, that people usually marry someone who resembles their parent? For he does not assume this, he cites it as evidence.

It must be from his patients.

Neurotic people, then, at least in upper class Victorian Vienna, are likely to violate a basic instinct for exogamy, and marry someone like their parents.

If this can only be caused by their first orgasmic experience, this suggests that people become neurotic because their parents made incestuous advances on them in childhood or adolescence.

This flips Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex. It is not that Sonny wants to do it with Mum. It’s that Mum has done it, like it or not, with Sonny.

This was in fact Freud’s original assumption, his “seduction theory”: mental illness came parents who used their own children for their sexual pleasure. He claimed for years to find memories of this in every single case who came to his office.

Then he swapped the seduction theory suddenly for the “Oedipus complex,” without much explanation. He said he was simply too horrified by the implications. He decided the sex must have been purely imaginary. If imaginary, coming from the child, not the parent.

Looks like he was right the first time.

Not, I think, that this stands as the direct cause of all mental illness. Rather, mental illness is caused by a parent who sees their child as an object, there for the parent’s benefit. It is caused by a lack of parental love. Incest is one likely consequence. Emotional abuse is another: kick the family dog to make yourself feel better.

Incest is presumably not natural to the parents of the mentally ill any more than to us. But if you are sufficiently depraved, your own child is always available as a sex object, after all. This may have been more important in Victorian Vienna, where eager sex partners outside of marriage were thinner on the ground.

The Interpretation of Dreams

 

Freud, apparently homosexual without knowing it, fingers somebody's penis.

It is unwise to listen to the psychologists about dreams. Most of what we think we know from psychology is from Freud. Freudianism has no scientific basis. He just made stuff up. 

Are his notions right? All we can do, since we have no evidence for them, is, first, to decide whether they make sense; whether they are at least internally consistent. Second, we can ask whether they conform to previous beliefs about dreams, which, while we equally may not know what evidence or reasoning they are based on, at least reflect the wisdom of the ages.  

On both counts, the answer has to be no. Freud is nonsense.

To begin with, Freud’s concept of a “subconscious” of repressed memories or urges has been debunked. Troubling memories are not repressed; if troubling or alarming, they are far more likely to be conscious. We have known this at least since Aristotle. Everybody remembers where they were on 9/11, for example, precisely because the experience was traumatic. Repression of urges, in turn, is not subconscious. It requires a conscious effort to fight urges. We have known this at least since Moses. That’s why we have the Ten Commandments.

One common idea about dreams is that all the characters in a dream are aspects of oneself. That is from Jung more than Freud, but Jung too has no scientific basis. When it is not based on Freud, Jung’s ideas come from old gnostic texts, which he apparently misunderstood. Even if he did not, there is a reason why Gnosticism is not a living school of thought—it did not survive the test of time.

You could say the same of the characters in Shakespeare—that they are all aspects of Shakespeare’s own mind. True, but only trivially true; Shakespeare is not trying to explain or understand himself, but the world. It makes more sense to see dreams as the working out in symbolic and narrative form of the problems we face during the day. Some of our problems may be with our selves; but some with other people, or God, or nature, or fate, or the post office. Think of the seven conflicts: man vs. man, man vs, self, etc. Dreams are stories, and all stories are based on these seven conflicts.

Perhaps the craziest idea about dream interpretation that we inherit from Freud is that things in dreams mean the opposite of what they say. This notion, absurd on its face, has become “common knowledge.” Freud seems to have invented the principle so that he could make anything mean anything he wished. For example, there is no trace of Freud’s “Oedipus complex” in the actual legend of Oedipus. Oedipus has no desire to kill his father or have sex with his mother. His father, on the other hand, wants to kill him, and his mother wants to have sex with him. Yet Freud cites this as his main literary evidence for the “Oedipus complex.” A cigar can be a cigar, if Freud wants it to be a cigar; or if he prefers, it can mean anything else.

Unfortunately, Freud has poisoned pretty much everything we think of as psychology, even if real psychology has mostly disavowed him, or thinks it has.

Best to assume that whatever you have heard from “psychology” is wrong.

Social Science

The South Sea Bubble

Why are so many so devoted to the social sciences—even though after a couple of hundred years of effort, that stake has never panned out? They have never built any solid body of knowledge about society or human life. As the mathematician and nuclear physicist Stanlislaw Ulam noted scornfully long ago, every result they have ever produced is either trivial, or not true.

Freud and Marx dominate popular culture and the academy. Even though both have been long ago positively disproven in any scientific terms. Yet everyone seems to simply ignore this, and carry on. The same could be equally said of lesser figures: Margaret Meade, Noam Chomsky, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, “learning styles,” “left brain-right brain.” Karl Popper, our reigning cultural authority on what is and is not science, compared it all to astrology. But nobody will let the false theories go.

It deserves a section right after St. Vitus's Dance and tupilmania in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Except that this irrational faith in social science would need a section bigger than the entire remainder of the volume. We have gone elaborately crazy nuts. Mad King Ludwig had nothing on us.

So what is driving this?

I think the answer is not that hard to find. People grasp at social science as a substitute for religion. Religion is the discipline that previously covered the same subject matter: man's soul, man's inner being, man's relationship with his fellow man.

And social science appeals because it strips out all moral considerations. Leaving people feeling free from moral constraints.

How could anything be any clearer than that this is the base of Freud's appeal? Sex in the street!

Marx, in turn, gives license for envy and for scapegoating. Take what you want from others! If you have less, it's the oppressive system! You deserve what you want!

This is usually the tacit appeal of every new theory in the social sciences: it gives license for some traditional vice. Beyond freedom and dignity!

This is not going good places. I think it fair to say, from an objective consideration of history, that social science has brought us the awful mass murders and monstrous wars of the 20th century. All of them. Not to mention the growing epidemic of mental illness worldwide.

Time to wake up and move on.

Heroic Depression and Depressive Heroes: Otto Rank

Burne-Jones: Perseus and Andromeda

Neither Sigmund Freud nor Alice Miller, intrepid analysts, as we have seen, are trustworthy in their reports of clinical evidence. So much for clinical evidence: this reveals a fundamental flaw. What we have glimpsed seems to favour the Dymphna legend over Freud’s Oedipus Complex as a paradigm for mental illness. But by their nature, clinical reports are unreliable. They are always at best third hand: reported by patient to analyst, and then by analyst to us. We are lost in a game of Chinese whispers. Try that at home.

Even were the reports first-hand, clinical evidence is little more than anecdotal. Samples are small; there is no control; respondents are self-selected.

We must, therefore, resort to literary evidence. Other than our own experience, it is all we have.

This is what Freud does. Aside from Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, he refers us to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as evidence of the Oedipus Complex from literature. Beyond this, he refers us to the work of Otto Rank.

In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud writes:

“It is once again an interesting fact that the Oedipus complex, which has been rejected from real life, has been left to imaginative writing, has been placed freely, as it were, at its disposal. Otto Rank has shown in a careful study how the Oedipus complex has provided dramatic authors with a wealth of themes in endless modifications, softenings and disguises” (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1916-1917).

He speaks here of a study Rank issued in 1909, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. It is to this volume that we now turn, to either substantiate or falsify Freud’s thesis.

But first we must ask, is Freud right in this initial assumption? Do we have just cause to believe these ancient stories are about the workings of the psyche? Perhaps they are just good stories; perhaps they are, as many have thought, allegories of the heavens, of the movements through the seasons and the sky of sun and moon. We have warrant, from long tradition, for the story of Dymphna being about mental illness. We would have such warrant, say, for a legend of “Amor and Psyche”--literally, “Love and the Soul.” Both Oedipus Rex and Hamlet seem to show their protagonists as suffering from the familiar symptoms of depression. But is this so for the hero myths Rank selects?

Rank offers his argument. He calls myths and literature “a dream of the masses of the people” (Myth of the Birth of the Hero, p. 10). Joseph Campbell, writing his Hero With a Thousand Faces almost a half-century later, makes nearly the same claim: “Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream” (The Hero With a Thousand Faces, p. 19). Myths are pure expressions of the content of the human unconscious, then, just as dreams are, assuming dreams are. They are a window on the soul. Rank goes so far as to see myth and literature as essentially insane: “The projection mechanism … necessitates the uniform characterization of the myth as a paranoid structure, in view of its resemblance to peculiar processes in the mechanism of certain psychic disturbances” (The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, p. 78).

This is, fortunately or unfortunately, not true. Myths and literature differ from dreams in one essential matter: their authors are conscious and know what they are doing. They exercise conscious control over their contents. They are therefore literally not “from the subconscious”; unless some particular author resorts to automatic writing, or recording his dreams. Authors like Shakespeare or Sophocles were aware and able to choose what happened next, or what this character’s motivation is. Myths and fiction are no more dreamlike or randomly generated in principle than the writings of Sigmund Freud or Otto Rank. The imagined window on the subconscious slams shut.

There is, however, a second possibility. Even if the original composition of a myth was conscious, what accounts for its preservation and popularity over the years? Surely this is because it speaks to something in the collective subconscious? You could say, “it just makes a good story”: but then, what makes a story a good story? Is it not that it powerfully appeals to our emotions?

Klimt: Danae

And what accounts for the observed similarity of myth motifs everywhere? Both Joseph Campbell and Rank highlight this: "the psychological study of the essence of these myths might help to reveal the source from which has flowed uniformly, at all times and in all places, an identical mythological content" (Rank, op. cit., p. 9). This is true enough: although there are no dragons in nature, everywhere there be dragons in folk tales, in China as much as in England. Every folk tradition seems to recall a universal flood. Unicorns emerge from the forests of China and of France. There is a Korean version of “Cinderella.” In pagan times, Romans had no trouble recognizing gods they met abroad as versions their native Roman gods.

This fact does not, however, make the myth contents unconscious. Surely the popularity of myths, as much as their original invention, is founded on a collection of conscious individual choices. People do not decide to transcribe or retell legends against their will. And, in principle, no quantity or mass of conscious thoughts makes one unconscious thought. If most people cannot or do not say exactly why they love a particular story or fictional character, this does not necessarily mean they are unconscious of it. It may mean they cannot or do not see any point in trying to express the attraction in terms clearer than those of the story itself. For example, it is not necessarily that they do not know why they love Falstaff: it is that the easiest and most complete way to explain why they love Falstaff is by saying he is so like Falstaff, so Falstaffian. Can one say, similarly, adequately, why one loves one’s wife? One does so, perhaps, by recalling a story of some incident that reveals her personality. Like the stories of Falstaff. The human psyche is simply that complex; it cannot be reduced to simple discursive statements. What was it that Heraclitus said?

“One would never discover the limits of psyche, should one traverse every road--so deep a logos does it possess.”

What we can say, therefore, is that myths and legends that manage widespread and longstanding popularity must somehow, for that to be so, represent some universal and important human concern; but not the contents of the unconscious.

Rank is right to point out that this concern cannot be purely to do with the physical world: “the astral theory is not altogether satisfactory and fails to afford an insight into the motives of myth formation” (op. cit., p. 7). It is, for example, a universal experience that the sun rises each morning in the east; but is it a universal concern? Is it not, instead, simply a commonplace? Why would people everywhere spontaneously care enough about it as to marvel at and record and remember stories told about it? To set up little altars to it and offer it sacrifices?

Moreover, a simple physical observation like seeing the sun rise every morning simply does not require a myth or legend to express it. It is sufficient to say “the sun rises every morning.” Why take the trouble of couching such a thing in literary terms? That is unnecessary hard work. Old Occam would go bankrupt were he such an extravagant barber.

When one is speaking of myths, the bar of significance must be particularly high. These are stories of such great human significance that they were commonly felt to merit religious worship. The intrinsic value of their message must approach the ultimate. The mechanics of cloud formation, for example, just would not seem to cut it.

How the psyche (i.e., the soul) functions, what is its purpose and destiny, on the other hand, looks to be one of the few worthy and plausible subjects for such myth or high literature—along with questions about the nature of the cosmos (which is, please note, not the physical universe, but the ordered universe, the logos: matters like beauty, the good, the true, balance, justice, value, the principles of logic and of mathematics, why we are here and what happens when we die).

The experience and workings of the soul, then, would indeed be an experience common to all mankind. This would explain the universal similarity of myth motifs. Two plus two equals four no matter where you are; and sorrow is sorrow, and love is love.

The experience of depression, melancholia, or mental illness, what it is, where it comes from, and what might cure it, would then be a topic likely to be found there somewhere.

Understanding myths as primarily about the workings of the soul, moreover, explains well why they are presented as narratives and in symbolic or allegorical language—a significantly harder thing to do than simply framing declarative sentences. Psychic matters are, by nature and by definition, not directly present to the senses. You cannot taste anger, or smell imagination, or hug justice.

Gilgamesh (modern)

What is visible and tangible is called physis or body; what is not visible or tangible is called spirit or psyche.

The physical world is apparent in detail to all of us; it is visible. I can say “rock,” and if you perhaps do not know what I mean, I point to a rock, and we both understand. This is not true of psychic things: we may both experience love, and may both experience it at the same time, but we cannot clearly point to and confirm our experience as we can with a physical thing. I say “love”: but is it clear to you what I mean by the word? It is not. The experience you call love might be different.

We must resort to metaphor: we might say we have, for example, “the warm fuzzies.”

This is what T.S. Eliot called an “objective correlative.” We are in fact touching nothing either warm or fuzzy; but somehow this image drawn from the physical world manages to convey the essence. It is apparent to both of us what warmth is, and what fuzzy feels like. Love is to the emotions as warmth and fuzziness is to the touch.

There is, in sum, an automatic and absolute need for symbol, metaphor or narrative, as Eliot pointed out, to speak of things psychic. This includes not just emotions, but “abstract” concepts like ego, justice, freedom, imagination, memory, or moral good. Important things: indeed, all our most important concerns. We must either tell a story to illustrate, like Romeo and Juliet, or use an objective correlative, like “my love is like a red, red, rose.”

Hence we make myths and compose literature.

Freud and Rank then are right in looking at myth and literature to validate their ideas of the psyche; but for the wrong reasons. Myth and literature are indeed our best sources on the interior life. However, it is not that myths and literature are spontaneous upwellings of the “subconscious.” It is not that they are the ravings of madmen. It is that they, uniquely, are able to describe interior states. Not referring to them is like trying to talk about mathematics without using numbers. The best and clearest thinking on such matters will be found there.

And so we accept the evidence of literature as valid.

But is Rank right to look specifically at hero legends for examples of neurosis? After all, these are not the only kind of myth, or of literature. What of the comic muse, which has nothing to say about heroes? Even among myths, the classic myth is the story of a god, not a mortal hero.

Rank argues for hero legends as definitive because, he says, the ego is bound to see itself as heroic, and therefore to identify as the hero. “The ego of the child behaves in this respect like the hero of the myth, and as a matter of fact, the hero should always be interpreted merely as a collective ego, which is equipped with all the excellences” (Rank, pp. 72-3). The hero legend is the story of the development of the individual ego. “Myths are ... created by adults, by means of retrograde childhood fantasies, the hero being credited with the myth-maker’s personal infantile history” (p. 84). This seems to have become an accepted principle, endorsed again by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. More specifically, Rank explains, “These neurotic children [who write the myths] are mostly those who were punished by the parents to break them of bad sexual habits, and they take their revenge upon their parents by their imaginings” (The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, p. 70). “Daydreams are neurotic and all about sex” (ibid., p. 69).

This fairly obviously cannot be so. Not all egos are egotistical, and therefore prone to see themselves as exceptional--as the hero of a heroic story. Protagonist, perhaps; but this is not the same thing. And even this is simple-minded as a reading of literature: the audience does not necessarily identify with a story’s protagonist.

Some people are humble by nature. Some people are depressed. Depressed egos would be, prima facie, especially disinclined to see themselves as “heroic,” and so unlikely to see themselves portrayed by a hero legend. Neither Hamlet nor Oedipus, indeed, are straightforward examples of the “hero” genre--as would be, say, Heracles, or Beowulf, or Rama. Even if the chorus or audience might hail them as heroes, and others might praise them in their respective plays, Hamlet and Oedipus are themselves strikingly prone to self-criticism. Ergo, Rank’s argument contradicts itself: if Hamlet and Oedipus are accurate reflections of the depressive or neurotic type, hero legends cannot represent this type; or not through the mechanism he proposes.

Yet this is Rank’s assertion: that depressives and neurotics created the hero legends as projections of their own inflated self-image.

Rank’s sampling of hero legends is also skewed in another obvious way. There is such a thing as a heroine in literature; but when we think “hero legend,” the hero of the legend is almost necessarily male—as the name implies. Merriam-Webster gives the meaning of the word as “a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability.” Oxford defines hero as “a person who is admired for their courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.” Courage and strength are traditionally more characteristic of, and more admired in, the male.

Heracles

And, as a matter of plain fact, all of Rank’s chosen examples are male.

This is odd since most of Freud’s patients, and probably Rank’s too, were female.

Women make up half the human population, and are reputedly about as likely as men to suffer depression. Accordingly, Rank’s selection cannot be giving us a full portrait of depression.

Nevertheless, once again, Rank’s selection may be useful, even if he arrives at it for wrong reasons. It was, in fact, often observed among ancient authors that heroes as a class tended to be melancholic. Gellius called melancholy “a disease of heroes” (Attic Nights, XVIll, 7, 4; R. Klibansjy, E. Panofsky, F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, London: 1964, Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., p. 16). Aristotle pondered why “the tragic heroes, like Ajax, Heracles and Bellerophon … were melancholics” (Problem XXX; Saturn and Melancholy, p. 17). So, while the story of the hero may or may not be intended as a paradigm of melancholy, it may be understood as an example of it.

To be clear, judging by described symptoms, the ancients meant by “melancholy” largely the same thing we now call “depression.” Hippocrates writes “Constant anxiety and depression are signs of melancholy.” (Aphorismata; Saturn and Melancholy, p. 12). Galen writes, “Hippocrates was right in summing up all melancholy symptoms in the two following: Fear and Depression” (De Locis Affetis, 3, 10; Saturn and Melancholy p. 12).

DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) the official authority in the US for diagnosing mental illnesses, lists the first symptom of depression as “Depressed mood or irritable most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful).” Anxiety or fear is not mentioned. The manual prefers objective, physical symptoms like weight gain or trouble sleeping. Officially, the two, anxiety and depression, are now considered separate “disorders.” However, anxiety is actually a common feature of “depression” as experienced. “Nearly one-half of those diagnosed with depression are also diagnosed with an anxiety disorder,” notes a New Zealand web site. Funny, that. I have even heard it said that it is a more common symptom of “depression” than depressed mood. For DSM 5, the latest version as of this writing, it was proposed to add “irrational worry, preoccupation with unpleasant worries, trouble relaxing, feeling tense, fear that something awful might happen” as an official symptom of depression. But apparently there was resistance to tinkering with such a “popular” diagnosis (http://www.psnpaloalto.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Depression-Diagnostic-Criteria-and-Severity-Rating.pdf; https://pro.psychcentral.com/dsm-5-changes-depression-depressive-disorders/004259.html ).

So, why would heroes be depressive? Why would heroes, of all people, have low self-esteem?

We are no longer obliged, like Rank, to assume that self-described heroes wrote their own stories, or that the stories exist because listeners identify with the hero’s heroism. The stories can have been written by others out of admiration. So, without contradiction, the protagonist’s actual actions can be obviously praiseworthy, while he himself thinks they are not. This apparent paradox does, however, confirm something previously noted of Oedipus and Hamlet and neurotics generally: for whatever reason, the disturbance, as Freud put it, rides the strongest horse in the stable. In the examples we have seen, Dymphna, Oedipus, Ophelia, and Hamlet, the depressive tends to be exceptional in general: unusually beautiful, unusually intelligent, unusually athletic. Heroic qualities—great strength and courage—would be further examples of this.

One can also see why “low self-esteem” might well, contrary to modern pop psychology, lead to great accomplishment. If one feels good about oneself, one has that much less reason to prove oneself worthwhile. Simply being Hercules, and enjoying it, is enough. If one feels lousy about oneself, one has motivation to do something exceptional to justify one’s existence: something heroic.

Tristan and Isolde

Aside from seeing only male heroes, Rank’s choice of specific examples looks arbitrary, and he nowhere accounts for his selection. The web site ThoughtCo, “the World’s Largest Educational Resource,” gives a list of the “ten greatest heroes of Greek mythology” (https://www.thoughtco.com/greatest-greek-heroes-118992): Heracles, Achilles, Theseus, Odysseus, Perseus, Jason, Bellerophon, Orpheus, Cadmus, Atalanta. Rank’s selection includes only two of them. He omits Ajax and Bellerophon, despite Aristotle having singled them out as examples of depression. He includes the life of Jesus as a hero legend--surely an unconventional choice. Yet, if he wants to use biographies of religious figures as hero legends, where are Muhammed, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Manes, Gandhi? None appear on his list.

One is led to assume that Rank’s selection is of legends he believes best illustrate and reinforce the thesis of a universal Oedipus Complex.

So, do Rank’s examples indeed demonstrate the reality of Freud’s Oedipus Complex? If not, if they fail to show the Oedipus Complex despite all this, surely it is thereby conclusively disproven.

They do not; they do fail to show it. There is a conspicuous lack among them of any visible effort or intent by said heroes to either kill their father or couple sexually with their mother—the two essential elements of Freud’s monomyth. Of Rank’s 15 examples, there are only two or three heroes who kill or try to kill Dad or some other father figure. There are two who marry Mom incestuously—both unintentionally.

Rank’s complete list: Sargon, Moses, Karna, Oedipus, Paris, Telephus, Perseus, Gilgamesh, Cyrus, Tristan, Romulus, Hercules, Jesus, Siegfried, Lohengrin.

Sargon: no and no.

Moses: no and no.

Karna: no and no.

Oedipus: yes and yes; but both are unintentional.

Paris: no and no.

Telephus: no and yes; but the incest is unintentional. Without either knowing the identity of the other, he is given his mother’s hand in marriage. The marriage is not consummated.

Perseus: yes and no. He does not kill his father, but he kills his grandfather unintentionally with a discus thrown at an athletic competition. He also kills Polydectes, who could be considered his step-grandfather--to protect his mother from incest. In other words, like Hamlet, he is portrayed as the opponent of incest.

Gilgamesh: no and no.

Cyrus: no and no.

Tristan: no and no.

Romulus: no and no.

Hercules: no and no. He does kill his tutor, Linos, who may be considered in loco parentis, a substitute for the father.

Jesus: no and no. The very thought seems absurd.

Siegfried: yes and no. He kills his stepfather, but in self-defense.

Lohengrin

Lohengrin: no and no.

For comparison, let us see how Rank’s chosen examples accord with the Dymphna complex. Even though, for this purpose, they are purely randomly selected.

Broadly, to review, our “Dymphna Complex” hypothesis argues that the essence of depression is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); and that, in the normal course of things, the most likely source for the trauma is significant and systematic mistreatment during childhood. Such systematic and significant abuse most probably comes from selfish and abusive parenting. This may be most aptly represented in story by the parent, of either sex, either killing the child, trying to kill the child, or coupling with them for their own pleasure. Or, to suggest another obvious possibility, devouring them. These are not the only possible images, but they are the “objective correlatives” we have seen so far.

Let us see:

Sargon: his mother tries to kill him at birth. She is a high priestess; presumably she must rid herself of the inconvenient child because she was supposed to be virginal, and had an illicit affair. Her pleasure and position come first: the kid must die. Yes and yes—attempt to kill, selfish parent.

Moses: his parents try to kill him at birth. However, this does not necessarily signify. They did not want to kill him; the act was by command of the Pharaoh. But then little Moses is fished out and adopted by the Pharaoh’s unwed daughter, putting the Pharaoh in loco parentis. So, retroactively, yes, his step-father did try to kill him, with full intent. Moreover, interestingly, the marriage of his natural parents, innocent of malice as they might be, was also incestuous: Amram and Jochebed, his mother and father, were nephew and aunt (Exodus 6:20). This is a marriage relationship prohibited as incestuous in Leviticus. Pleasure and self trumped family responsibilities.

There is another anomaly in the Moses story that, as such anomalies always do, commands our attention and alerts us to look for further meaning. According to Exodus, the decree of the Pharaoh was to kill all male Hebrew children, but not females (Exodus 1:16). It looks as though this was to prevent these slave people from multiplying and becoming too powerful; this is a concern mentioned earlier in the text (Exodus 1: 9-10). But this cannot be the true explanation. One male can father many children; ask any farmer who keeps cows or chickens. But the number of children per female is more strictly limited. Mothers are the key. The way to prevent the Hebrews from multiplying would be to kill all the female children. As if to reinforce this point, Hebrew descent is traced through the mother.

The infancy of Cyrus

This contradictory detail may be there to alert us delicately that the real unspoken reason for the Pharaoh’s policy was sexual jealousy: kill the sons, and ravish the daughters.

In either case, this would not seem to have the best interests of the Hebrew children at heart. And so, in the case of Moses, we again have yes and yes: the parents attempt to kill the child, and the parents are shown as selfish.

Karna: his mother tries to kill him at birth. This is because she, a princess, is unwed, and an illegitimate child would prevent her from one day becoming a queen. So again yes and yes, wanting to kill the child and putting her own pleasures before her family responsibilities.

Oedipus: as we have seen, both natural parents tried to kill him at birth. One wed him, but without knowing. Or so she claims. Yes and yes.

Paris: his father, Priam, tried to kill him at birth. However, this was not for his own purposes, and with regret; he had been warned that the child would lead to the downfall of Troy. Accordingly, he cannot be accused of selfishness. Paris might himself be charged with indulging illicit sexual desires in abducting Helen; but at least they were not in violation of his family responsibilities. The violation was of Helen’s. This is not, then, a clear example of the Dymphna Complex: yes, he suffered trauma in childhood, but no, it was not due to a selfish parent. And he is, in turn, a dubious example of a hero. Heroes characteristically rescue the polis from danger: they do not cause the danger.

Telephus: his grandfather tries to kill him at birth. The case is complicated by Rank’s refusal to see women as heroes. The original abused child here seems to be Telephus’s mother, Auge; Telephus’s own fate looks like collateral damage, and his own story like an extension of hers. Auge’s father forces her to become a virginal priestess and refuses her her own life—a fine image of possessiveness. When she nevertheless conceives due to rape, the child is exposed, and she is sold into slavery as punishment. Her new master then adopts her, and, again abusively, tries to force her into a marriage—he gives her away as a prize. This marriage is actually, unwittingly, to her son, and so incestuous. Combined, Telephus and Auge seem to be male and female versions of a story of child abuse.

Auge’s father, in trying to prevent her from having her own life and family, and then in selling her into slavery, is surely behaving with extreme selfishness. That the selfishness and the refusal to allow his child to have their own life extends to the third generation accentuates the depth of his depravity. So, yes, and yes; in Telephus’s case, taking his grandfather as in loco parentis.

Romulus and Remus

Perseus: his grandfather tries to kill him at birth. As with Telephus, the story of his mother, Danae, seems to be as important as his own, and as famous. Her father locks her in a bronze tower, making his possession of her complete. Zeus nevertheless manages to impregnate her, appearing as a shower of gold, and so her father tries to kill both mother and child by exposure. In Pindar’s version of the legend, Perseus’s father is not Zeus, but Danae’s paternal uncle, who rapes her—another incestuous near-parent.

Cast on the waters in a sealed casket, Perseus and Danae are rescued by a fisherman; the fisherman’s brother is the local king, Polydectes. Polydectes, now her adoptive father or uncle, takes an illicit fancy to the lovely Danae, and tries to kill Perseus, her protector, to get him out of the way. Because the relationship is not by blood, this might not stand out as incestuous in our modern terms. But, as we have seen, the essence of incest in pre-Mendelian times was a violation of the responsibilities of the family, not blood ties.

According to the legend—and this is commonly the case in these legends—his grandfather wants to kill Perseus and his mother because an oracle has said her child will replace him as king. However, Acrisius, Danae’s father and Perseus’s grandfather, is already advanced in years and has no other children when Perseus is born. Nor, according to the oracle, will he ever have any other children. In other words, Acrisius is deliberately cutting off the royal succession, at great risk to his kingdom as well as the cost of both his children and his grandchildren’s lives, rather than accept the idea of ever dying. It is a mad attempt to remain king forever—an image of supreme self-centredness.

We have here, therefore, an especially clear and complete analysis of the Dymphna/abused child/hero complex, given in both male and female forms, and reiterated. Yes and yes and yes and yes and yes.

Perhaps we also have by now enough evidence to notice a common difference in legends of the heroine and the hero. The hero, male, is generally persecuted at birth, an attempt made on his life when he is still in infancy. For the heroine, female, the first plan seems instead to be to exert total ownership. Which looks like pampering, not persecution. But when the ivory tower is broached, at or after puberty, all hell breaks loose, and an attempt is made to kill her then. We have seen this with Dymphna, Ophelia, Auge, and Danae. We will see it again.

Gilgamesh: according to the Greek telling that Rank cites, his grandfather tried to kill him at birth. Again, that this was the grandfather rather than the father accentuates the selfishness: Gilgamesh was the second oppressed generation. “He [the grandfather] became a second Acrisius [the father of Danae] for his daughter, over whom he watched with the greatest severity,” says Aelian (Animal Stories). When the child is born, he is thrown off the Acropolis, while the mother-daughter is imprisoned. So this fits again with the male and female patterns: the son is killed, the daughter enslaved. Yes and yes.

Cyrus: his grandfather tried to kill him at birth. Here we have another story of two generations of abuse. The king feared his grandchild would replace him, and so forced his daughter into marriage with a foreigner of distinctly lower class, to ensure that her progeny would attain no power. Nevertheless, when he discovers she is pregnant, he decides to kill the child. Yes and yes.

Siegfried

Tristan: both his parents die when he is born. As a result, he might be assumed to have had a difficult, deprived childhood; indeed, he is named “Tristan” because he is said to have been “born in sorrow.” But in this case it is not due to selfish parents. This example supports the idea that depression comes from a traumatic childhood, but demonstrates that this trauma is not always due specifically to a selfish parent. Yes and no: childhood trauma, but not due to the parents.

Romulus: his story is similar to those of Telephus and Perseus. His great uncle forces his mother to become a vestal virgin, to ensure that no third generation could arise to replace him in his dotage—or even after his death. When she nevertheless conceives, the twin children are exposed at birth to kill them. If we accept a great uncle as a substitute for the father, yes and yes.

Hercules: his mother, Alcmene, tries to kill him at birth. He is later rescued and returned to her as a foundling, and raised by her without knowing he is her own son. As he is the illegitimate son of Zeus, Hera, Zeus’s wife, might be considered his stepmother. She tries to kill him repeatedly, and hounds him throughout his life, out of jealousy over the affair. This might not be selfish on her part; unjust, but not necessarily a matter of selfishness. But Zeus as father stands accused, and rightly, of a selfish indulgence in his own pleasures in violation of his family duties; otherwise this persecution would not have happened. Hercules is made to suffer for the sins of his father, as scapegoat or whipping boy. Some versions of the legend say his stepfather, Amphitryon, also tries to kill him in his cradle. In any case, Amphitryon later exiles him from the family home, requiring him to live on his own among cattle. Not a perfect childhood. Yes and maybe.

Jesus: his life is threatened at birth by King Herod. But then, by the same token, if for his sake, so are the lives of many others—the Holy Innocents. Herod is not his father, and not in loco parentis. There is no image of sexual impropriety involving either himself or his parents--a virgin birth suggests the opposite. One might at a stretch argue that he is put to death by his “Father,” God the Father. But this is incoherent in theological terms. To begin with, he is not put to death by the actions of the father, but by mankind. If his father ultimately wills this, it is no more nor less true that he wills it himself: he lays down his own life for his friends. And the son and the father are one in will and substance. No and emphatically no, unless you assume the story is the opposite of the truth.

There are arguably traces of the hero legend here, but the story of Jesus is clearly anomalous in this group. It does not seem to fit either with Freud’s theories; nor with the common features of other hero legends. I suspect Rank includes it only to be provocative, to suggest that our stories of Jesus are myths—which is to say, by his interpretation, insane ravings of the sex-driven subconscious.

Paris

Siegfried: Siegfried’s mother is accused by the villainous Count Hartvin of having adulterous relations with a servant. According to the legend, these charges are false; she is innocent. Hartvin accuses her precisely because she has, virtuously, refused his adulterous advances. It is Hartvin, not a relation, who is being abusive and selfish; although Sigismund, Siegfried’s father, can be accused of being a fool and disloyal to his wife in suspecting her. Siegfried is almost killed in his cradle, but by Count Hartvin, not by a parent.

Later, his stepfather, Minir, tries to kill him. Minir summons his brother, Siegfried’s adopted uncle, who is conveniently a dragon, to devour the boy. Siegfried kills him in self-defense.

The Siegfried saga, then, vaguely, but only vaguely, reflects the Dymphna complex: Siegfried has a lousy time of it in childhood, and this is partly due to a step-parent, partly due to another’s selfishness and sexual desires. Yes and partly.

Lohengrin: his childhood is not featured in the classic stories. He is a hero without an origin story. He appears when needed in a boat pulled by swans. Perhaps Rank felt he had to include him because of his stature in the German imagination, thanks especially to the opera by Wagner. Uncertain and unknown.

So, from fifteen samples—for our present purposes, random—we have thirteen traumatic childhoods. There is a plain attempt on the life of the child in thirteen cases. This is by a parent or step parent in eight cases; by a grandparent in four more; and once by great uncle. In six cases, at least one of the hero’s parents seems to have been guilty of a serious sexual impropriety, suggesting an excessive devotion to their own desires. In five cases, a grandfather forbids his daughter, the hero’s mother, any independent sex or family life, surely an expression of extreme selfishness, and reminiscent of the relationship of Polonius and Ophelia in Hamlet. In almost all cases, the stated reason for the oppression of the hero is that he is expected to grow up to replace the parent or grandparent in power. In none does he actually do so, except inadvertently in the case of Oedipus. Rather than showing any malice towards the parent, then, the stories uniformly show parental malice is unjustified.

Long: The Birth of Moses

The stories, in sum, even though hand selected by Rank as the best literary examples of the Freudian thesis, discredit the Freudian thesis. They fit well, on the other hand, with the Dymphna thesis: neurosis (and perhaps heroism) is caused by trauma, and most often by a selfish parent’s hellish abuse in childhood or adolescence.

How does Rank account for the discrepancy?

He does so by invoking a simple but unjustifiable principle of interpretation: that everything in myth and dream means the opposite if what it says. When the stories say the child is being threatened with death by the parent, he is actually being born: death is birth and birth is death. When the parents want to kill him, that means he wants to kill his parents. When the hero’s real father is the king, but he is raised by humble shepherds, it means his real parents are humble shepherds, but he fantasizes being a son of the king; and so on.

This does not, to be fair, apparently work with every detail. Girls are not boys, and boys are not girls; sons are not mothers, the sky is not below, and boats are not always found traversing dry land. It only works, one suspects, when useful for the Oedipal thesis.

Let Rank tell you himself. I am not making this up:

“The fictitious romance is the excuse, as it were, for the hostile feelings which the child harbors against his father, and which in this fiction are projected against the father. The exposure in the myth, therefore, is equivalent to the repudiation or nonrecognition in the romantic fantasy. The child simply gets rid of the father in the neurotic romance, while in the myth the father endeavors to lose the child” (Rank, op. cit., p. 73).

“The highborn parents are the echo, as it were, of the exaggerated notions the child originally harbored concerning his parents” (ibid., p. 82).

This is not a legitimate principle of literary interpretation. Literary works are consciously composed. Accordingly, this is to accuse the authors, if not raving insane, simply of lying. You need to have strong evidence for such a charge; Rank gives none, other than his supposed expertise from clinical observation. It is no more legitimate than to assert without evidence that the writings of Otto Rank or Sigmund Freud always really mean the opposite of what they say. It is, in fact, less legitimate.

Telephus sucked by a doe

If you not going to take the literal meaning of a text, you need some warrant for this: there must be a flag or clue in the source that a metaphor or symbol is intended. That is for any metaphor, let alone for a flat reversal of meaning.

In the case of the hero legends, we have a specific warrant that this is NOT permissible and is NOT the case: we are entreated by all that is good and holy in the stories themselves to read them as meaning what they say. In Shakespeare’s play, for example, it is extremely important to Hamlet that people say just what they mean, and not dissemble. Note his dialogues with Polonius and Osric. To him intent to deceive is anathema. So too with Oedipus’s determination to find the truth in his investigation of Laius’s death, no matter where the hammer of justice may fall. Lying is out of the question. Dymphna, in turn, is a saint of the Catholic church; with all that that implies regarding the Eighthi Commandment.

It would therefore be a violation of the core message, in a hero legend, to lie. There might of course be metaphors or figures of speech; but not lies.

There is however an obvious example at hand of another text which offers us just such a legitimate warrant to assume it may be lying. Ironically, Ranks and Freud’s casual suggestion that other texts can be read this way gives us reason to suspect Rank and Freud consider this fair play. They are thereby expressly reserving the right to do so themselves.

We have a right to suspect, therefore, that they see childhood abuse and the Dymphna Complex plainly enough, as we can, in these literary sources; but choose for their own purposes, whatever they might be, to deny it.

It is hard not to suspect this in, for example, Rank’s insistence that stories of exposing children to die must be purely fictional, while the reality is a desire to kill the father. This is especially hard to credit because we know, and knew when he wrote, that the ancient Greeks and Romans really did commonly expose unwanted children to die; as did most ancient civilizations. Yet parricide or matricide has always been considered a serious crime. So how can one reasonably assume infanticide is imaginary, and parricide the reality?

Elsewhere, Rank rightly observes: “The father who refuses to give his daughter to any of her suitors, or who attaches to the winning of the daughter certain conditions difficult of fulfillment, does this because he really begrudges her to all others, for when all is told he wishes to possess her himself. He locks her up in some inaccessible spot, so as to safeguard her virginity (Perseus, Gilgamesh, Telephus, Romulus), and when his command is disobeyed he pursues the daughter and her offspring with insatiable hatred” (Myth of the Birth of the Hero, p. 80). Exactly. And yet this shows the child’s animus against the parent? Plainly, the legends present a selfish and possessive father.

Sargon of Akkad

Rank surely stretches credulity again when he describes the parent’s attempt to kill the child as the child’s aggressive “desire to enforce his materialization even against the will of the parents” (ibid., p. 76). Can he really expect to be taken seriously?

Point, set, match. Judged by his own chosen evidence, Freud was 180 degrees off kilter. The many generations of sufferers who came to the Shrine of St. Dymphna for her intercession were right. Depression is due to childhood trauma. And the best among us seem to have known this for millennia.



iOr ninth, if you follow the Protestant numbering.

Mothers Sexually Abusing Sons

Shades of the Dymphna Complex! This just came down the news pike.

I wonder if this sort of thing goes on much more often than we realize, and nobody reports it.

There are a lot of single Moms out there these days...

Freud's Seduction

Martyrdom of St. Dymphna

As we have seen, Freud is not a reliable witness when he offers literary evidence for the existence of an Oedipus Complex driving mental illness. His version does violence to the actual events of the stories he cites, Hamlet and Oedipus Rex. He holds that the child wants to kill the one parent, and have sex with the other. Both plays, however, show the parent wanting to kill the child. There is incest, but the incest either does not involve the child (Hamlet), or it is against his will (Oedipus).

The real story line of these plays conforms instead to the legend of Saint Dymphna, the patron saint of mental illness since Medieval times: the parent wants to kill the child, and/or have sex with them.

Since Freud is untrustworthy on the literary evidence, which we can examine for ourselves, we have reason to doubt his word on the clinical evidence, which only he has really seen. If he can so distort the evidence we can see, he is at least as likely to have distorted the evidence we cannot see.

In fact, we can be pretty sure he did distort it. For the Oedipus Complex was not the first interpretation of this data that occurred even to Freud. He first saw something more like the Dymphna Complex. In 1896, Freud published a paper, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in which he confidently declared, on the basis of his clinical experience, that mental illness came, not from repressed Oedipal desires, but from—just as we now believe—childhood trauma. It was PTSD.

In the 1896 paper, he maintains that every patient he has seen had suffered childhood sexual abuse.

“In some eighteen cases of hysteria I have been able to discover this connection in every single symptom, and, where the circumstances allowed, to confirm it by therapeutic success” (Standard Edition of the Complete Works, vol. 3, London: Hogarth, 1953-74, p. 199; Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth, 5th Ed., NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Untreed Reads, 2012, loc. 1219). In letters to his close friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess, he calls this experience of sexual abuse “the key that unlocks everything” (undated letter; Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis, NY: Basic, 1954, p. 73; Masson, loc. 1050). “At the bottom of every case of hysteria,” he writes, “there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood” (“The Aetiology of Hysteria,” Standard Edition of the Complete Works; Masson, loc. 3094). He suggests that the motto of psychoanalysis should be “What have they done to you, poor child?” (letter to Fliess, December 22, 1897; Masson, loc. 1615).

Freud sees the issue as sexual assault specifically, and takes little notice of other forms of abuse: he does not consider any physical or emotional harm to the child of other than a sexual nature. This diverges from the Dymphna, Oedipus, and Hamlet legends, all of which speak also of attempted murder—a fairly serious omission.

This may, however, have to do with the state of psychiatry and psychiatric discourse at the time. Odd as it may sound now, it was accepted then as a bedrock principle that mental illness was caused by masturbation (Masson, loc. 1057). “There is no question,” writes Emma Eckstein in 1904, “as the leading figures in psychiatry tell us, that masturbation practiced in early childhood can have dire consequences for the mental development of the individual” (Die Sexualfrage in der Erziehung des Kindes (The Question of Sexuality in Child-Rearing), Leipzig: Curt Wigand, 1904, p. 14; Masson, loc. 2711).

Freud, too, believed this.

To Freud, therefore, the focus on sexuality may have been a given, an assumption he never thought to question. It is also an assumption of special value to someone seeking a purely material basis for our psychic ills: they can thereby all be traced to the Darwinian need for propagation of the species. Psychiatry accordingly validates itself as a science founded on biological principles.

Freud does seem to acknowledge, in some degree, that the issue may be the emotional or psychological experience, not the physical experience, of sex. The parent, he says, “is yet armed with complete authority and the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfaction of his moods” (“The Aetiology of Hysteria”; Masson, loc. 3279); while the child is “at the mercy of this arbitrary will” (ibid., loc. 3280). It would seem to follow that emotional abuse is the real issue, not sexual abuse; but Freud does not pursue this. It is too abstract, perhaps, for his “scientific” temperament. He remains resolutely materialistic: “stimulation of the genitals, coitus-like acts, and so on, must therefore be recognized, in the last analysis, as being the traumas which lead to a hysterical reaction to events at puberty and to the development of hysterical symptoms” (ibid., loc. 3148). In the end, it’s physical. It would be troubling to scientific objectivity if either real human emotion or ethics were really involved.

He also does not stress that the sexual assaults are incestuous; instead, he speaks of sexual experience of any kind. However, it does seem that these “premature sexual experiences” were indeed usually incestuous; Freud avoids saying so explicitly, it seems, out of Victorian modesty. Freud writes of “the fantasy encountered in most female patients... that the father seduced her in childhood” (Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, New York: International Universities Press, 1962–1975, vol. 4: 1912–1918; Masson, loc. 322).

“At some time during 1895 or 1896,” writes Jeffrey Masson, “Freud had become convinced that the person most often guilty of the sexual abuse of young children (primarily girls) was the father. In the published letter of September 21, 1897, to Fliess, Freud writes: ‘Then the surprise that, in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse’” (Masson, loc. 1293). In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1916, Freud writes that among female patients “their father figures fairly regularly as the seducer” (Standard Edition of the Complete Works, vol. 16, p. 70; Masson, loc. 1797). Elsewhere he writes “With female patients the part of seducer was almost always assigned to their father” (Autobiographical Study, 1925; S.E. vol. 20, pp. 33–34; Masson, loc. 2593). Again, “almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father” (New Introductory Lectures, 1933, S.E. vol. 22, p. 120; Masson, loc. 2621).

Odd that Freud did not consider the fact that the sex was incestuous worthy of more mention.

Nor was this specifically a father-daughter dynamic; according to Freud’s patients, the assailant (Freud uses the euphemism “seductor”) was as likely to be the mother. His patients were apparently mostly women, skewing the sample, but even so, at one point he writes: “girls regularly accuse their mother of seducing them” (“Female Sexuality,” S.E. vol. 21, p. 238: Masson, loc. 2613).

In other words, if Freud’s account is to be accepted, most of his female patients reported under analysis that they had been sexually assaulted in childhood by both their mother and their father.

It should be noted that “seduced” is used here as a euphemism: another example, perhaps, of Victorian delicacy. More explicitly, Freud speaks of “a brutal assault committed by an adult or by a seduction less rapid and less repulsive, but reaching the same conclusion” (“L’Hérédité et l’étiologie des névroses,” S.E., vol. 3, p. 152; Masson, loc. 1258).

In 1905, Freud publicly retracted this “seduction theory,” that neurosis was caused by childhood sexual assault, and replaced it with the “Oedipus complex,” that it was caused by a childhood wish to have sex with the parent. The most obvious explanation was not the one he settled on as the real one.

Why?

Publicly, he gives his reason in “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” (1914; S.E., vol, 14; Masson, loc. 1769): the “Seduction theory” “broke down under the weight of its own improbability and contradiction.”

Privately, he explains to Wilhelm Fliess in correspondence:

“The continual disappointment in my efforts to bring any analysis to a real conclusion; the running away of people who for a period of time had been most gripped [by analysis]; the absence of the complete successes on which I had counted; the possibility of explaining to myself the partial successes in other ways, in the usual fashion — this was the first group. Then the surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse — the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, with precisely the same conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable. (The [incidence] of perversion would have to be immeasurably more frequent than the [resulting] hysteria because the illness, after all, occurs only where there has been an accumulation of events and there is a contributory factor that weakens the defense.) Then, third, the certain insight that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect. (Accordingly, there would remain the solution that the sexual fantasy invariably seizes upon the theme of the parents.) Fourth, the consideration that in the most deep-reaching psychosis the unconscious memory does not break through, so that the secret of the childhood experiences is not disclosed even in the most confused delirium.” (letter to Wilhelm Fliess, 1897; Masson, loc. 1492).

His first concern, that the theory of childhood abuse was powerless to bring an analysis to a successful conclusion, contradicts what he himself claimed earlier: one of his justifications for the seduction theory in 1897 is that it had been “confirmed by therapeutic success” (“The Aetiology of Hysteria,” S.E., vol. 3, p. 199; Masson, loc. 1219-1223). This underlines the sad reality that we cannot accept Freud’s claims for his clinical evidence at face value.

Moreover, this is a non sequitur: there is no reason to suppose that knowing the cause of one’s suffering will end the suffering. Does knowing you broke your leg in a fall heal the broken leg? Indeed, neither the Dymphna story, nor the Oedipus legend, nor Hamlet suggest that merely realizing you have been abused is a cure. Rather, for both Hamlet and Oedipus, it is this very knowledge that causes the onset of symptoms.

This reveals a crucial point: Freud’s primary concern was not to find the cause of mental illness. Nor, for that matter, was it to cure it. It was to find a clinical technique employable by physicians like himself, and monetizable, to cure it. While it might be relevant for Freud’s purposes, this objection carries no weight for ours.

Nor, it should be mentioned, is there any clear scientific evidence that Freud’s eventual methods are any better at bringing “mental illness” to a conclusion. They are not, it seems, clearly superior to the “seduction theory” even in that regard. What we can say is that people are prepared to pay for them. Freud is troubled with “the running away of people who for a period of time had been most gripped [by analysis].” For all we know, this might be because they felt themselves cured; but it did not suit Freud’s purposes.

What to make of Freud’s fourth objection: “in the most deep-reaching psychosis the unconscious memory [of sexual assault] does not break through”? If this is true—that in the most serious cases of insanity the patient cannot seem to remember anything about incest—might this not simply be an indication of how serious the psychosis is? So much so that they are unable to communicate well enough with the analyst, or have lost contact with their own experiences and memories? After all, when you are in general denial of external reality, why would you not be in denial of this particular external reality? Or, might it simply indicate that the causes of common neurosis were different from those for the most deep-reaching psychosis? Why assume they are the same? Or again, the problem is as likely to be with the techniques Freud has developed for eliciting such memories; they may not be powerful enough to work on those who are deeply psychotic.

Leaves us with Freud’s third point, that the unconscious “cannot distinguish between truth and fiction.” This is obviously true: dreams do not restrict themselves to reporting real events. But this is an objection, not to the thesis that mental illness is caused by childhood abuse, but to Freud’s insistence on taking these accounts of sexual literally: that they must describe actual sexual contact. They might instead be a symbolic representation of emotional abuse.

To insist on a literal interpretation seems naive and wrong, just as indeed it later appeared to Freud. Hamlet argues against it: there the incest, as we have seen, is significant only as symbolic of a possessive and self-centred attitude; Hamlet himself is not involved. Nor, so far as we can tell, did Polonius literally rape Ophelia. Nor did Damon ever actually rape Dymphna: the intent was the point.

Unfortunately, Freud’s training and prejudices were those of a physician, a materialist, a doctor of the body. He did not accept or understand that statements can have meanings beyond their literal meanings, and that such meanings were not arbitrary. Once he was forced to abandon the idea that memories and dreams of incest must refer to literal experiences of incest, he was apparently inclined to understand them instead as “lies”―and impute mendacity to his patients. He knew nothing of poetry.

His patients were a pack of liars, then.

It was a short step to blaming them for everything.

“I dream,” Freud writes to Fliess, “of a primeval devil religion whose rites are carried on secretly, and I understand the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges” (letter of January 24, 1897; Masson, loc. 1469). Sandor Ferenczi, his closest disciple in his later years, records Freud saying “patients are riffraff” (Diary entry for May 1, 1932; Masson, loc. 2468).” Jung reports similar comments: when he tells Freud of his experiences with one schizophrenic patient, Freud responds, “But how in the world were you able to bear spending hours and days with this phenomenally ugly female?” (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, NY: Vintage, 1962, p. 160).

I hope you, at least, gentle reader, can see the problem. When Robert Burns wrote, for example, “my love is like a red, red rose”―would you really look at his wife, and at a rose, and accuse him of lying?

Nor is the image of the rose arbitrary. Could Burns have conveyed the same message by saying “my love is like a cabbage”?

Had he had a decent literary education, Freud might have grasped this from the literary sources. A play, after all, is in itself an extended metaphor. The Battle of Agincourt is not happening before you, on the Globe stage. Moreover, in Oedipus Rex, oracles are consulted. When did an oracle ever speak plainly?

Just so, the imagination by its nature speaks in symbols and metaphors.

This is what happens when a literalist and a materialist tries to make sense of the human soul.

But this alone is not enough to force Freud to abandon his seduction theory. Given that what the imagination produces is often not literally true, what leads Freud to conclude that it is not literally true in this case? It still might be. After all, in his earlier writing, Freud even claimed to have independent verification:

“I regard it as a fortunate accident that, out of eighteen cases, I have been able to obtain an objective confirmation of this sort in two. In one instance, it was the brother (who had remained well) who of his own accord confirmed — not, it is true, his earliest sexual experiences with his sister (who was the patient) — but at least scenes of that kind from later childhood, and the fact that there had been sexual relations dating further back. In the other instance, it happened that two women whom I was treating had as children had sexual relations with the same man, in the course of which certain scenes had taken place à trois. A particular symptom, which was derived from these childhood events, had developed in both women, as evidence of what they had experienced in common” (“The Aetiology of Hysteria”; Masson, loc. 3142-3148).

This brings us then to Freud’s second objection: “the surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse.” This is the crucial point, and it is surely a valid one. Most people feel no urge to have sex with any child, let alone their own. Let alone their child of the same sex. Let alone giving in to this urge. Yet if we are to believe Freud’s patients, or Freud’s account of his patients, all or nearly all were sexually assaulted by both their mother and their father in childhood. It seems unlikely that such a phenomenon should be so widespread.

However, this too is an objection to taking the reports of incest literally, not to the reality of childhood abuse. The soul speaks in parables, symbols, and metaphors; and it is most concerned with spiritual, not physical, affairs. Take the incest as a symbol of a smothering, possessive, self-interested parent, and the objection disappears.

When we, in common speech, say, “I got screwed,” or “he screwed me,” not to cite less delicate terms, do we always mean this literally?

The incest image must still be figuratively or symbolically important, otherwise why did the patient imagine it? And imagine it, according to Freud, associated with obviously heightened emotions: “in such a way that he seemed to be living through it with all the appropriate feelings” (“The Aetiology of Hysteria”; Masson, loc. 1280). But we experience similar heightened emotions, after all, while watching a horror movie. This does not prove that the events actually occurred.

In other words, Freud offers no valid reasons for giving up his initial and more straightforward thesis, that all had suffered abuse in childhood. He does have valid reasons for giving up the assumption that the abuse was only sexual. Yet, to preserve his thesis that the roots of mental illness are sexual, he surrenders the assumption that they are found in abuse. Perhaps this is because his primary commitment is to a material rather than a spiritual or emotional cause for “mental illness.” He needs to find as cause something that might concern a physician—as opposed, say, to a minister or priest.

In speaking of his disappointment at having to abandon his original “seduction theory,” he writes to Fliess:

“The expectation of eternal fame was so beautiful, as was that of certain wealth, complete independence, travels, and lifting the children above the severe worries which robbed me of my youth. Everything depended upon whether or not hysteria would come out right” (Letter to Fliess, September 21, 1897; Masson, loc. 1517).

Not such a rare or surprising sentiment; and not such a discredit to him. But it reveals Freud’s bottom line. It is not truth; it is fame and fortune. So what would happen if the true cause of mental illness was not useful to him in this way? Would he accept that, or keep looking? It was important for him, as a medical man, to find what looked like a physical, medical, cause for mental struggles.

Sandor Ferenczi

There has since been frequent backsliding, by one analyst or another, to the original and, indeed, as we have seen, traditional thought that mental illness comes from childhood abuse. This was so for Freud’s nearest collaborator in his later years, Sandor Ferenczi. In his diary, Ferenczi writes that neurosis seems to be “the result of real acts on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward the child, who then develops a fixation, not from desire [as Freud maintained], but from fear. ‘My mother and father will kill me if I don’t love them, and identify with their wishes.’” (Diary entry of September 21, 1897; Masson, loc. 1964).

That sounds very much like Dymphna’s experience.

Ferenczi agrees with Freud in seeing the chief issue as literal sexual abuse; he too is, after all, a medical doctor, a “man of science.” But he is aware of the possibility of other forms of mistreatment. He sees scapegoating: “the parent who denies what he has done, or denies its harmful effects, often becomes physically abusive toward the child (projecting the wickedness onto the child).” He sees physical abuse: “Not only forced love,” he writes, “but also unbearable punishments can have a fixating effect” (“Confusion of Tongues,” 1932; Masson, loc. 3513). He sees emotional abuse: “Seduction,” he points out, meaning the incestuous seduction of one’s child, “is a form of hatred, not love” (ibid.; loc. 1988). “It is the hate [the adult feels for the child]” he writes, “that traumatically surprises and terrifies the child who is seduced by an adult, and transforms him” (ibid.; loc. 3554).

He also sees another important form of emotional abuse: “the terrorism of suffering.” “In addition to passionate love and passionate punishments there is a third way of binding the child to oneself and that is the terrorism of suffering. Children have the compulsion to smooth over all kinds of disorders in the family, that is to say, to take onto their tender shoulders the burdens of all others; naturally, in the final analysis, not out of pure unselfishness but to regain the lost peace and the tenderness that is part of it” (ibid.; loc. 1999).

This is a type of abuse dealt with in detail by Alice Miller: selfish, immature parents force their children to take responsibility upon themselves for all their parents’ problems and concerns, to act as their parents’ parents. If psychiatry has been slow to see the issue, literature and popular culture have not been. This is a classic element of the “Jewish mother” type, familiar on page, stage, and screen. One example is Breavman’s mother in Leonard Cohen’s The Favorite Game. “A mother,” Ferenczi writes, “can make a lifelong nurse, in fact a substitute mother, out of the child by bewailing her suffering, totally disregarding the interests of the child” (Ferenczi, op. cit.; Masson, loc. 3537). This is also, in a similar fashion, the “co-dependency” examined in detail by Al-Anon and Adult Children of Alcoholics.

Robert Fliess, the son of Freud’s first collaborator, Wilhelm Fliess, who trained as a Freudian analyst, also circled back to the idea that childhood abuse was the key to mental illness. He uses the term “ambulatory psychotic” to refer to the Laius or the Damon personality, a parent who is entirely self-centred. Their “psychosis,” he argues, is generally invisible to the world outside the family home: they appear to be normal, even upstanding members of society (Masson, loc. 1880). But the story is very different in their dealings with their children. Fliess writes:

“There is no place here to deal with the inexhaustible subject of the psychoses; I can therefore say only in passing that the child of such a parent becomes the object of defused aggression (maltreated and beaten almost within an inch of his life), and of a perverse sexuality that hardly knows an incest barrier (is seduced in the most bizarre ways by the parents, and, at his or her instigation, by others)” (Fliess, Erogeneity and Libido: Addenda to the Theory of the Psychosexual Development of the Human, Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1956, p. 17; Masson, loc. 1906).

Especially since the 1970s, there have been a flood of others. Masson cites, apart from himself and Alice Miller, Elaine Carmen, Patricia Rieker, Trudy Mills, Florence Rush and Judith Herman. There have also, in recent years, been a number of autobiographies that describe just such abuse: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Random House, 1970); Sandra Bulter’s Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest (New Glide Publications, 1978); Louise Armstrong’s Kiss Daddy Goodnight: A Speak - Out on Incest (Hawthorn Books, 1978); Susan Forward’s Betrayal of Innocence: Incest and Its Devastation (Penguin, 1979); Katherine Brady’s Father’s Days (Seaview, 1979); and Charlotte Vale Allen’s Daddy’s Girl: A Memoir (Simon and Schuster, 1980). It is now, it seems, the standard view.

Unfortunately, as the titles of many of those autobiographies suggest, we are still generally focused on sexual abuse as the core issue. This simply does not make sense: emotional damage comes most probably from emotional, not physical, abuse.

Other elements of the Dymphna story also seem to be confirmed by the cumulative clinical experience. We have mentioned before Freud’s comment that “the disturbance rides the strongest horse in the stable” (quoted, for example, by James FitzGerald, What Disturbs Our Blood, Toronto: Random House, 210, p. 419)--that neurosis or mental illness seems to afflict the most talented in a family, or in society as a whole.

He is not alone in this perception. In 1860, the French physician Ambroise Tardieu wrote a pioneering account of French children subjected to extreme parental abuse, “Etude médico - légale sur les sévices et mauvais traitements exercés sur des enfants” (“A Medico-legal Study of Cruelty and Brutal Treatment Inflicted on Children,” Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 2nd ser., 13 [1860], pp. 361–398). He notes: “Their features reveal the deepest sadness; they are timid and apprehensive, often they look dazed and the expression in their eyes is lifeless. But sometimes, often in fact, it is very different: they have a precocious intelligence which only reveals itself in a dark fire in their eyes” (op. cit., p. 365; ).

Purely imagined? Romantic nonsense? Perhaps. But Ferenczi claims the same thing. He finds that his patients “display a strange, almost clairvoyant knowledge of the thoughts and emotions of the analyst” (“Confusion of Tongues”; Masson, loc. 3454). He suggests a theory: “The sexually violated child can suddenly bring to fruition under the pressure of traumatic exigency all future faculties which are virtually preformed in him and are necessary for marriage, motherhood and fatherhood, as well as all feelings of a mature person. Here one can confidently speak of traumatic (pathologic) progression or precocity in contrast to the familiar concept of regression” (ibid.; Masson, loc 1991). He theorizes that “they have been the victims of such cruelty on the part of their parents that in order to survive they had to develop a remarkable sensitivity to determine what their parents were really feeling, so that they could avoid their murderous rage.” Accordingly, they become “sensitives,” and are so adept at reading the emotions of their clients that they seem aware of—indeed, are aware of—hidden knowledge (loc. 2438).

Perhaps. But, whatever the reason, we have here confirmation of another aspect of the Dymphna complex: that the abused child has unusual intelligence and/or a special contact with the spiritual world. This is Oedipus’s signature ability to solve riddles. This is Hamlet’s knack of seeing through and reading the intentions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of Polonius and his manipulation of Ophelia. More abstractly, this is Oedipus’s ability to bless any place he visits, and Dymphna’s saving powers as intercessor.

One might explain this talent, as Ferenczi does, as a necessary survival tool. It might also be the result of growing up living life through another’s eyes. That may bring great suffering, but also teach empathy. “Gradually I came to the conviction,” writes Ferenczi, “that patients have an extremely refined feeling for the wishes, tendencies, moods, likes and dislikes of the analyst, even should these feelings remain totally unconscious to the analyst himself. Instead of contradicting the analyst, instead of accusing him of certain misdemeanors or blunders, patients identify with him” (ibid.: Masson, loc. 3403). It also rather sounds like sainthood.

As Ferenczi sees it, this tendency is naturally tied to a tendency to refuse to blame the parent for anything. “The overwhelming power and authority of the adults renders them [the children] silent; often they are deprived of their senses. Yet that very fear, when it reaches its zenith, forces them automatically to surrender to the will of the aggressor, to anticipate each of his wishes and to submit to them; forgetting themselves entirely, to identify totally with the aggressor” (ibid.; Masson, loc. 3474)

In his early study, Tardieu reports with puzzlement the experience of a Dr. Nidart, called to testify against the parents of an abused girl:

“What Dr. Nidart discovered, to his evident puzzlement, was that Adelina would ‘invent stories’ of what had happened to her, in order to cover up the crimes of her parents against her own person, ‘imagining’ falls and accidents, rather than allow others to know the horrible truth of what had been done to her. As we shall see, her parents had kept her literally hermetically sealed off from the real world outside, and in a pathetic, heartbreaking gesture of tenderness toward her own tormentors, she wished to protect them ... from the world” (Tardieu, op. cit.; Masson, loc. 397).

This is the same tendency Adult Children of Alcoholics and Al-Anon refer to as “enabling.” Elsewhere, is is known as the “Stockholm syndrome.” Ferenczi speaks of “introjection”: the guilt that the parent ought to feel is instead “introjected” into the child, so the parent can remain guilt-free (Masson, loc. 1980). This also appears in “scapegoating”; making it especially effective.

“She (or, more rarely, he) becomes ashamed, the victim of the unconscious remorse of the parent that is expressed in violent anger toward the child” (Ferenczi, op. cit.; Masson, loc. 1986).

Ferenczi says the child is sometimes obliged to deny objective reality in order to protect the parent from blame. As a result, “his confidence in the testimony of his own senses has been destroyed” (loc. 3484). This is what is sometimes called “gaslighting.” One can see how this might encourage the development of psychosis.

Another element of the complex that Ferenczi comments on is a great sensitivity to hypocrisy. We have already seen this in our literary examples, but perhaps not taken sufficient notice of it.

Masson writes, speaking for Ferenczi:

“The analyst behaved with neutrality, but actually felt something quite different. These feelings, especially when they were negative, were not conveyed to the patient. This, Ferenczi felt, was hypocrisy. Moreover, he noticed that his patients were very sensitive to this hypocrisy, and try as he might to conceal his real feelings, patients invariably uncovered them. This sensitivity to genuine emotional states began to preoccupy Ferenczi more and more (the diary discusses it at length). He speculated on why his patients were so sensitive to issues of truth and honesty” (Masson, loc. 2101).

This is a special case of the victim’s ability to see through hand understand underlying motives. But it seems to be an especially important issue. We see it in Hamlet’s testing of the sincerity of Polonius and Osric:

Osric: I thank your lordship, it is very hot.
Hamlet: No, believe me, ‘tis very cold; the wind is northerly.
Osric: It is indifferent cold, my lord, indeed.
Hamlet: But yet methinks it is very sultry and hot for my complexion.
Osric: Exceedingly, my lord; it is very sultry.

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.

It is not just that the victim of abuse is able to see through hypocrisy: he or she seems to have an underlying need to do so. Perhaps this is the effect of growing up with counterfeit love, or with a parent who seeks always to manipulate. One craves sincerity, and doubts all assertions. It may also be the consequence of having often been “gaslighted.”

To review, then, the evidence from clinical psychiatry confirms the accuracy of the Dymphna legend as an analysis of the causes of mental illness: permanent emotional damage is most often caused, as a sort of PTSD, by abuse from self-centred parents. In the accounts of Freud, Ferenczi, Fliess, and others, we find again the motifs of incest and malice by the parent towards the child. We find too many other elements testified to by the literary version of the tale: an exceptional victim, with apparent spiritual powers or talents; a resistance to blaming the parent; selflessness and self-sacrifice; a need for sincerity.

The sad thing is that this has all plainly been understood, in ancient times, in Medieval times, and in the Renaissance; at least by some. The literary sources are testament to this. The history of psychoanalysis, then, has been of a long effort to escape the evidence, which has now collapsed. Leaving us dragging our swollen foot back laboriously to roughly the point at which it all began generations ago.

At how much cost in human suffering?