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JANUARY 21, 2021 | The Jewish Home
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OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
An Easy Trick to Control Emotions By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
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n January 24, 1984, The New York Times bravely published a write-up of a forthcoming book sharing formerly hushed-up letters written by Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, “a Berlin nose and throat doctor with whom Freud carried on a … 15-year friendship” (according to the online, unredacted version of its original article, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/24/science/freudsecret-documents-reveal-years-ofstrife.html). It appears that Freud did not easily or readily give up his original conclusion that “hysterical symptoms” came from childhood molestation. The French medical establishment vigorously opposed this theory and wanted to instead attribute hysterical symptoms of women to “fabrication and fantasy.” What was the truth? A researcher, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, was appointed project director of the Sigmund Freud Archives. This was a body of formerly unpublished letters that Freud had written to Fleiss and other people. These letters indicated that Freud not only thought – originally – that these hysterical women were telling the truth about their childhood abuse but that even
his own father was not a moral man. Freud apparently waivered in his conviction that abuse was the real cause of hysteria. The theory was presented to the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology on April 21, 1896, but two things happened to make him wonder if he wasn’t wrong: One, the frequency with which he encountered women (and some men, including his own brother) with hysteria was hard to swallow. Two, social pressure in the form of the outrage of the medical establishment. A year later he wrote Fleiss that he was starting to reject his theory, but later that year, he wrote again that his “confidence” in it was increasing. We now know, of course, that his original take was the correct one. According David Finkelhor, Director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center: 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse; Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized; Children are most vulnerable to CSA between the ages of 7 and 13. Freud hid his own finding from himself because it was too disturbing to believe.
But Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter, completed what Freud started. As keeper of her father’s history, she was horrified by an earlier New York Times article in which Masson and others were interviewed. She promptly fired Masson, and 75,000 documents stored in the Freud archives became “prohibited” to the public and to researchers, “in some cases, into the 22nd century.” I certainly understand how embarrassing this material is. But…. Children are being hurt every day. Shouldn’t the truth have come out of the shadows way earlier? Remember I’ve been talking about parts and Self these last few weeks? Some of our more disturbing emotions are carried by parts. And if we don’t want to feel them, we push them away. That is just what Freud and Anna did. They pushed away disturbing emotions. Well, it is disturbing to think that children are injured every day by the people who are supposed to protect them. So one way to deal with that is to feel the anxiety of dealing with it and allow that anxiety to keep you up at night – but at the same time, to help the children who need it. Or help those children after they come to adulthood.
Another way to deal with that depression and anxiety is to convince yourself that the information you’re confronting can’t be true, so let’s rethink it, perhaps whitewashing it. That’s what Anna Freud and her father did.
We Do This Every Day Anna was embarrassed at the findings, and her father was perplexed by them. But a worse case scenario is when people who have our ear and our respect hide information from us because they are so attached to their position. Not only do they hide information but they create a smokescreen behind which to hide it. That smokescreen is the clever use of language. If they sound like they have a moral advantage, then we don’t question them. For example, the BDS movement sounds very noble. It wants to sound like there is a moral high ground to not doing business with Israel because Israel, so their narrative goes, mistreats the Palestinians. Many lives have been lost because of the BDS’s erroneous movement and the people who were gullible enough to accept its “moral” position.
