A Timely Conference on Sigmund Freud : Adherents Look at Terrorists, the Future and the Father of Psychoanalysis’ View of Women

“In the past,” Abe Kaplan observed, “if someone thought he was Napoleon, the chances were he would be locked up. Today he is apt to occupy a seat of power.”

Kaplan, professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa and a visiting professor at UCLA, was one of the speakers at a conference on “The Century of Freud” held at the Westwood campus last weekend.

But this was not simply another gathering of Freudians and Freud groupies intent on analyzing the first analyst, nor was it a musty academic dissection of id, ego and superego, of repression and regression.

Consider, for example, some of the speakers’ topics at last weekend’s gathering sponsored by the University Extension: “Updating Freud’s Views of Women,” “Freud and Terrorism” and “Freud and the Future.”

Kaplan, whose subject was undoubtedly the most timely, noted that “Terrorists are like everybody else, only more so” and that in trying to understand the terrorist’s mind it is wise to zero in on these commonalities rather than to look for some gulf that divides us and them.

Psychological Themes

He pointed to psychological themes that are beginning to emerge from the terrorists’ actions, among these the violent act as “aggrandizement of a sense of masculine potency.” He noted that there used to be an increased incidence of airplane hijackings after each American space spectacular, which Kaplan interpreted as the terrorist’s need to show that “up there, he also has the right stuff.”

He observed, too, that the most effective person in dealing with the terrorist on an airplane is the female flight attendant--”In her deference to him he already finds gratification of a significant part of his motivation.”

Kaplan suggested, too, that “the act of terror may be a device for the attainment of intimacy.” After Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert F. Kennedy, he said, “I loved that man,” Kaplan said.

Violence, he said, can be “a way of dealing with inchoate, confused and conflicted feelings” and “enough anxiety apparently can overcome any amount of guilt.” In a group, Kaplan said, the terrorist finds an esteem and power he cannot feel within himself.

Freed From Constraints

When a terrorist takes a code name, he added, it is not because it is a cover but because it gives the terrorist a new identity and “frees him from constraints both of reality and of morality” so that he can regress to immaturity and act by the authorization of others.

He spoke of a widespread “magical belief in violence,” for example: “The TV set doesn’t work and we pound it . . . the Coke machine doesn’t work and we kick it. We think that capital punishment will deter murder,” that frontal lobotomy and electric shock will cure mental illness.

“The virtuosos of violence have always been romantic heroes,” Kaplan said, and the gunfighters, gangsters, private eyes and secret agents of 20th-Century lore “are all precursors of the terrorist as romantic hero.”

Freud recognized the role of fantasy in individual development, Kaplan said, but “it is quite another thing to act out such fantasies” and it is that acting out that has given rise to today’s “culture of violence.”

In terrorism, he said, “there is operative something that I call a sacrament of violence--the notion that by the spilling of blood we can compel the gods to our service . . . open the gates of limitless power . . . the cause is made holy by the spilling of blood. And in the end it is the blood of the priest himself that must be spilled.”

In ancient China, he pointed out, the man wronged would commit suicide at his enemy’s door so that enemy would have to bear the burden of guilt. In World War II, Japan’s Kamikaze pilots were drawn largely from Zen adherents who had been taught that “giving up one’s own life is sealing the covenant with one’s own flesh.” Today, he said, car bombs and suicide missions “are expressions of this belief in the sacraments of violence.”

Irrational behavior is “neither meaningless nor incomprehensible,” Kaplan said, and “if we understand it we can deal with it,” but understanding it does not mean accepting it any more than “understanding the etiology of a disease makes the disease more acceptable.”

Sigmund Freud, the Viennese-born founder of psychoanalysis, has been dead for almost half a century. As Dr. Leo Rangell, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and past president of both the American Psychoanalytic Assn. and International Psychoanalytic Assn., noted, these have been, for the most part, years of “destruction and division” and some “bewilderment” within Freud’s profession.

Rangell, who moderated a program at the conference, said that Los Angeles “has been a magnet for psychoanalytical theorists of all kinds--good ones and bad ones, enduring ones and fleeting ones.”

And, it did not go unmentioned by conference speakers, psychoanalysis in the ‘80s must cope with realities far more provocative than differing ideologies. These include genetic engineering, psychopharmalogical approaches to dealing with psychiatric disorders (including self-medication by cocaine and other drugs) and holistic approaches to healing.

Dr. Clay Whitehead, chief of inpatient psychiatry at Sepulveda VA Medical Center and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, put it this way: The only thing one can be certain of in the 21st Century is that psychoanalysts will continue to “think Yiddish and dress British.”

Whitehead spoke of the possibility that, through genetics, there could come a time when “the population would no longer have truly psychotic individuals.” But, he added, genetics will not be able to eliminate “social maladaptation.”

The stresses today are different from those of Freud’s time, he noted--people no longer feel repressed by Victorian standards of behavior and sexuality but, in a high-tech society with diminishing human contact, are struggling to develop the self. “We basically are about the same kind of people as our grandparents were,” he said, people with problems, conflicts and insecurities.

Some titillating and occasionally worrying thoughts emerged from the conference. There was, for example, Rangell’s statement: “None of us could have founded psychoanalysis. We never could have withstood the jabs of our patients . . . we would have withered under them and quit and called the patients names.”

Freud, on the other hand, “was able to see complications as data” and he also came to understand transference, the way in which a patient may transfer to his analyst repressed feelings that the patient had never been able to express to parents.

There was Dr. Heiman Van Dam, associate clinical professor, Department of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, UCLA, explaining vulnerability to the cult phenomenon and illustrating basic vulnerability by mentioning that by California law a customer cannot be solicited to take more than seven years of dance lessons--”For a while, people were going door to door and selling dancing lessons for 75 years.”

Jay Martin, a professor of literature at USC, told of Dr. Roy Grinker, a University of Chicago neurologist who underwent analysis with the master in Vienna in 1938--not because he felt he had a troubled mind but because his university was establishing a psychology department and the Rockefeller Foundation paid for Grinker’s trip, and for his treatment (at $25 an hour) in the name of scientific research.

In his writings, Grinker told of Freud tripping over an electric cord, falling flat and bloodying his nose, while Grinker lay on the couch of couches, frozen into inaction. Grinker wrote: “I finally got up off the couch and pulled him to his feet.” (For the record, Grinker discovered in analysis with Freud that he was depressed and later underwent analysis with three other practitioners.)

In her presentation, “Updating Freud’s Views of Women,” Dr. Doryann M. Lebe, associate clinical professor, Department of Psychiatry, UCLA, acknowledged Freud as “one of the great geniuses of this century” but one whose ideas came from himself, from his self-analysis and therefore “there were bound to be blind spots, and a masculine orientation.”

Among these ideas she cited that of the universality of the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, penis envy, the importance of the unconscious, dreams, childhood and adult sexuality and the instinct or libido theory.

Freud’s “phallocentric bias,” she said, and his focus “away from painful human experience, from socially induced conflict” to internal, intrapsychic conflict were two factors that contributed to delayed understanding of women’s psychosexual development.

Whereas Freud considered his theories to be sexually neutral, she noted, they instead “reflect a consistent, observational and evaluative bias. He implicitly adopted himself, the male life, as the norm, then tried to weave women out of masculine cloth.”

In focusing on internal conflict, Lebe said, Freud “delayed understanding of women’s identity--especially that their identity develops in relation to their attachments, not only through autonomy, separation and independent achievements.”

However, she said, it would be simplistic to say that “since Freud was a man, he came up with theories based on himself, a man, and applied them in a universal manner to both men and women.” She pointed out that he both encouraged and respected women colleagues and opened the new profession of psychoanalysis to women even as he failed to question his own viewing of development through masculine eyes.

The answer to this dichotomy, Lebe contended, lies in Freud’s own psychoanalysis having been only self-analysis--”Even Freud could not successfully stand completely outside of his own deepest conflicts and defenses.”

Strong Ties to Mother

As his mother’s first-born and indisputable favorite, she observed, he had strong ties to her and a need “to keep his mother perfect, free from ambivalence, to protect himself from his anger toward her, his fear of losing her.” Lebe theorized that the negative side of his ambivalence, though unconscious, revealed itself in his theories of the sexual development of women.

She pointed out that, when Freud was only 11 months old, his mother gave birth to a second child, Julius, who died at eight months, and, when Freud was 2 1/2, a sister, Anna, was born. At the time of Anna’s birth, she noted, the nurse who had cared for Freud since birth was dismissed for stealing.

Freud later acknowledged his “ill wishes” toward his brother Julius and his feelings of guilt over the infant’s death. And, as he also had powerful love-hate feelings toward the nurse, Lebe speculated, when she suddenly disappeared, like Julius, he must have construed her disappearance as “magical fulfillment of his ill wishes” even as he was shattered at the loss.

Freud developed a defensive need to idealize his mother, Lebe said, to protect her from his hateful wishes--”Otherwise she would disappear like Julius and the nurse.” This, Lebe said, “explains Freud’s avoidance of exploring the mother-son tie, and explains his displacing all negative feelings toward his mother to his theory of mother-daughter development.”

She added, “Freud, a genius, needed to preserve the perfect mother-son tie,” but his theory survives, Lebe said, because of the intense life-long impact on men of the early mother-son relationship, the continuing “conflict over longing for that early mother-son bonding and pushing away because of fear of engulfment, to protect their sense of maleness. . . .

“Culturally, I think it is a serious reason for why we see women’s importance and power depreciated. Men need to keep this a man’s world, and only a woman’s world at home . . . as women have become less blind and have confronted issues and situations, it has increased awareness of men’s struggles as well as women’s issues and development.”

Among things Freud failed to observe, she said, was that boys and girls are treated differently by their parents from birth.

It must be remembered, Lebe said, that “Freud was also a product of the Victorian, Austrian middle-class culture. Women were expected to be mothers and housewives, men to be the financial providers and contributors of new ideas.” At home, she said, “the rest of the family was expected to be quiet while Freud studied. His mother and sisters took care of his daily needs.”

Masculinity Complex

Despite modifying some of his ideas in other areas, Lebe said, Freud clung for 30 years to beliefs such as “women who pursue masculine interests, meaning pursuing careers and making contributions to civilization, are sublimating their repressed wish to have a penis, and have a masculinity complex.”

In a time when more than 18 million American families have an employed mother, and a majority of married women with children work outside the home, it is “preposterous,” Lebe suggested, “to define a majority of American women as suffering from a masculinity complex” and normal femininity needs to be redefined.

Finally, Lebe said, “The fact that there is so much to say, and so little time to say it, again reminds us of the tremendous impact Freud has had on all our lives . . . 130 years after his birth, psychoanalysts, academicians and the knowledgeable public are still discussing, agreeing and refuting his ideas. He lives on . . . in our institutions, universities, writings, movies and consulting rooms.”