I hate Freud.
His whole weird theory about penis envy and children being sexually attracted to their parents and secret desires and all that shit actually came straight out of an attempt to ally himself with wealthy and influential rapists and was a direct form of victim blaming.
He had started the research looking into âhysteriaâ which at the time was really usually referring to womenâs symptoms of PTSD. It turned out that the reason so many woman had these symptoms is because so many of them had experienced sexual violenceâ especially CSA and incest at the hands of their fathers.Â
At first he was making real progress, and it was through working with these women that he discovered that talk therapy could be used to treat trauma. The symptoms of PTSD were lessened when women were able to safely speak about their experiences out loud and be believed.Â
But it wasnât the women who paid for the therapy. It was their fathers, husbands, the same men who were perpetuating the violence in the first place. And Freud didnât want to validate his patients (the women) if it meant making his clients (the men) unhappy.
So he came up with a new idea. These symptoms werenât from trauma. The memories werenât real. These women were just sexual beings as children and had penis envy and it made them lust for their fathers and fantasize about the rape that they had reported to him. Thatâs where the shittiest parts of Freudâs theories emerged.
Another part of it besides just the monetary aspect, though, was that there was a feminist movement on the fringes starting up at the time and by publishing work about womenâs CSA he would be aligning himself with it and therefore losing support, respect, funding, prestige from his male peers and from the psychological community at large. He literally made that gross victim blaming shit up to keep his own reputation with these fucks and to make sure he still got publication and fame.
By coming up with fake theory about little girls fantasizing about incest he not only fucked over generations of women, the feminist movement that was arising, and the entire psychology field for years to come, but he also completely swept away any progress made in understanding trauma and so we didnât have any clue why men coming back from war had âhysteriaâ like women during WWI.
And our research on PTSD and trauma is still lacking to this day, especially because of the stigma that maybe traumatized people deserved it or wanted it or imagined it. People donât want to believe itâs real. Perpetrators of traumatic violence want everyone to forget about it, not acknowledge it, or trivialize it.
And they have Freudâs cultural legacy to help them.
