Psychoanalytic Abuse
Transgenderism and “Recovered” Memories
This piece, originally titled “Psychoanalysis in the UK never died: It has quietly become more powerful than ever. Should skeptics be bothered?” was accepted by an associate editor of The Skeptic magazine, Chris French. He recommended it to the current editor, Michael Marshall. The piece was rejected. I explain more of this background, which includes a link to the notorious male trans-identified activist “Natacha Kennedy,” on my website.
When The Skeptic was founded in 1987, British psychoanalysis seemed to be in terminal decline. Jeremy Holmes, a leading psychiatrist promoter of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, mournfully noted in 1991 that the efforts of UK analysts to penetrate mental health services had failed, in marked contrast to what their colleagues in the United States had achieved. Karl Popper’s 1962 attack on psychoanalysis as an unfalsifiable “pseudoscience” had been widely discussed, and his Nobel-winning supporter Peter Medawar had declared in 1975 that because psychoanalysis was “akin to a dinosaur or a [Z]eppelin” it would have “no posterity.”
At the same time, Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy promoted itself as not only falsifiable, but inherently honest, and open to testing in a way that psychoanalysis never had been. Freud and his chosen successor Anna moved to London in 1938 and stayed there rather than move on to the US. It was not helpful for the reputation of British analysts when the extent of Freudian mythologising, especially through Freud’s letters being selectively published and even “bowdlerized,” was revealed by a series of scholars. Ernest Jones, the most powerful British analyst before (and probably after) 1938, and Freud’s official biographer had described his late leader as a lofty “genius” who had “no help” in the late 1890s when finally dispelling the “dark” from the “realm of the unconscious” through his own “heroic” self-analysis, succeeding where all others from Plato to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had failed. But from the 1960s onward, Freud was shown to be a largely derivative entrepreneur for whom money was “the complex over which…I have the least control” (as Freud put it in a 1909 letter to Jung, published in 1974), and who had a substantial capacity for emotional dishonesty and “ruthlessness.”
Perhaps because The Skeptic’s editors have perceived that psychoanalysis was failing to thrive, unlike phenomena such as homoeopathy and creationism, they have published only one substantive piece on it, in 2003. This was not included in the selection made in 2010 by former editors Wendy Grossman and Chris French.
But psychoanalysis has, in fact, quietly thrived, at least within the most powerful (by far) UK body in mental healthcare: the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych). Both the Chair and the Vice Chair of its Faculty of Medical Psychotherapy are psychoanalysts, as are several other “Medical Psychotherapists” in the UK. In 2021 the RCPsych published its updated “Seminars” textbook, edited by Dr O’Reilly and Dr Gibbons. The first six chapters, written by them, emphasise the historical and current primacy of “the psychoanalytic approach,” and most of the other chapters do so as well. There is a barely subtle attempt to reinstate the view that Freud “discovered the unconscious,” as early as the second paragraph of Chapter 1: “Since the late nineteenth century psychoanalytic theory has provided a platform from which a series of models of the mind have evolved…most of mental functioning occurs at an unconscious level; a finding now widely supported within psychology and neuroscience.’
There is no mention, at all, of the decades of substantive criticisms and corrections of psychoanalysis and its historical claims, except a vague reference to Freud’s ideas being “controversial and challenging.” Medical students and psychiatry trainees are informed that “Like Darwin and Einstein, Freud changed the paradigms through which we understand ourselves…”
The RCPsych Dean (a powerful elected position, second only to the president) endorsed the book as “underpinned by evidence throughout” in her Foreword. She cited the well-known 1949 paper, “Hate in the Countertransference,” by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, as a particular influence on her development as a psychiatrist. Neither the Dean nor the many other chapter authors who reverently cited Winnicott, mentioned the well-documented unethical behaviour of Winnicott and his psychoanalyst pupil Masud Khan.
This revival of psychoanalytic influence, especially with its strong historical revisionism, should concern Skeptics on several grounds: potential direct financial and emotional harm to patients, diversion of NHS resources from more credible and better-evidenced modalities of psychotherapy, and indirect harms. For example, patients already find it difficult to obtain Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) despite it being recommended by NICE for some patients with borderline personality disorder. The Tavistock Clinic, which is the NHS’s specialist Trust for psychotherapy, and where psychoanalysts are influential, promotes psychoanalytic therapy without mentioning that NICE does not recommend it as a treatment for any major mental disorder and without any mention of DBT.
Some indirect harm may arise from the collusion of psychoanalytic therapists with some harmful drug treatments, and even ECT and psychosurgery. This has tended to be ignored by past critics of psychoanalysis, although some have focused on the early history of Freud’s promotion of cocaine, and the cover-up of the iatrogenic morphine dependency of the “first psychoanalytic patient,” “Anna O.” In chapter two of Seminars Dr O’Reilly stated that “non compliance with medication” was usually due to unconscious “resistance to change,” without mentioning that many concerns patients have about drug treatments are well-founded in reality. The history of dissenting patients (and psychotherapists) being “gaslighted” by psychoanalysts is as long as the history of psychoanalysis itself: in 1970, a leading London dissident (Melitta Schmideberg, the medically qualified daughter of Melanie Klein) reported that two “failures of psychoanalysis” she knew of had been financially exploited for twelve and twenty years, getting worse, until “in a very brutal manner” they were sent for lobotomy. Her previous attempts at reform had been met by Ernest Jones labelling her as having “paranoid attitudes.”
The Tavistock Clinic’s child gender identity service (GIDS) recently closed, after a review by the senior paediatrician Hilary Cass confirmed concerns that psychosocial issues were not being adequately explored, leading to overuse of drugs and surgery. The Tavistock’s medical director, psychotherapist Dr Dinesh Sinha MRCPsych, was found by an Employment Tribunal in September 2021 to have been “judgemental and punitive” towards the Trust’s Child Safeguarding Lead, Sonia Appleby. Dr Sinha remains in his post, despite the Tavistock continuing to provide specialist psychotherapy services to children. Four psychoanalytically orientated ex-employees have been key to raising concerns: however, their professional bodies, and NHS psychoanalysts, have remained silent.
But such an alliance, between psychoanalysis and overly biomedical psychiatry, cannot in my view wholly explain the current revival. One important reason for the failure of Freud’s critics to consign psychoanalysis to history must be the significant disagreements among themselves. Frank Cioffi argued that Freud’s many inconsistencies were so blatant that he must have been “particularly prone to…memory errors” (what we would now call false memories), while Frederick Crews’ 2017 summary of his work makes out the case for Freud’s repeated and deliberate “fraud.” Other key areas of disagreement concern psychological dualism, and whether somatoform disorders (“hysteria”) exist at all.
Many sceptics will already be aware of the close historical association of Freud’s so-called “seduction theory” with the modern “recovered memory” movement. It is concerning that Dr O’Reilly cites Jeffrey Masson’s 1984 book The Assault on Truth, and states that “this remains one of the most controversial areas of [Freud’s] work,” without referring either to the refutation of Masson’s assertions by Cioffi, Webster, Crews, and others, or to the recovered memory movement on which Masson was, and still is, a substantial influence. What may or may not be a coincidence (with this revival of British psychoanalysis) is the continued revival of this movement in the UK. Freud did not discover the unconscious but promoted the belief that traumatic memories are often “repressed” into his version of it, and can only be recovered by psychoanalysts trained in his own school. That belief continues to cause harm, more than a century later.
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This piece is a blunderbuss attack on psychoanalysis, invoking past controversies. Oddly, it also turns the brave whistelblowing of a key Tavistock employee (a psychoanalyst!) into an example of collusion with bad practice in the system. However, the GIDS sub-system was at odds with, not consistent with, psychodynamic tradition of the Tavistock, that is one reason why it has been unsustainable in that context, driven by the political economy of the NHS. This obvious fact did not get in the way of the author's argument. By contrast he argues that more scientific psychology can clear matters up, citing Eysenck and the virtues of cogntive behaviour therapy, as a harbinger of scientific rationality. Eysenck was a positivist, Popper was not. His critical rationalism understood science as value laden, whereas Eysenck was naive in this regard. Also Eysenck was part of a professionalisation project as a leader in clinical psychology, but Popper had no such axe to grind. Eyenck was a showman not a scientist-practitioner and his articles are being retracted from many journals for very good reason (reference below). And yet, he was the father of BT/CBT when setting up the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy. CBT itself is a revisionist product. Behaviour therapyy stood for behaviour, yet pragmatics had to allow inner events back into the equation. Yes psychoanalysis is not the only form of human science that morphs over time, with disputation in the ranks. Human science is inherently contested because human systems are open and the ontology of being human has hidden depths inside and outside of us. This scenario means that arguments go on and on in psychological theorising.
The arguments about false memory were touched upon and this is very important, especially as the author posits French as a back up to Eysenck's purported 'distinterested' positivism. But French, sceptic or not, has been complicit in the drift of the policy alignment between the British Psychological Society and the British False Memory Society (see reference below). If the author wants to consider the politics of the false memory debate, fine. But it requires more than the passing allusion in this piece to do it justice.
I finished the piece not being clear whether the author wanted to have a genuine open debate about epistemological and political aspects of mental health work, which are legion. If he does then fine but the problems of the psychoanalytical tradition are no fewer in number than those of the CBT brave new world. As an example, Eysenck was an advocate of conversion therapy for homosexuality. Trans activism has distorted conversion therapy by eliding sexuality and gender identity.
So finally, and repeated for emphasis, it was a psychoanalst who blew the whistle at the Tavistock. As he and other gender critical clinicians are now pointing out, whenever they are allowed, the real conversion therapy is turning healthy child bodies into sterilised ones in an evidence free zone. A core group standing up for exploratory rather then 'affirmative' therapy at GIDS were psychodynamic in orientaiton. They spoke out and many had to leave. Their honourable role is lost in this vendetta piece about Freud.
REFS-
Pilgrim, D. (2022) Verdicts on Hans Eysenck and the fluxing context of British psychology. History of Human Sciences (in press);
Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022) The Policy Alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23:2, 165-176,
I am grateful to Dr MacFarlane for his extensive reply. It is very extensive (straying in content beyond what was already a blunderbuss attack on psychoanalysis and linking it to the GIDS debacle). For this reason, in the context of this online exchange, it might create a rabbit hole for any reader fresh to our dialogue, if I dealt with each and every point.
However, consciously or not, Dr MacFarlane does point up two important current policy matters that implicate child protection. The first is whether the GIDS service harmed children, in its rush to 'affirm' gender identities and put many children who cannot vote, give consent to sex or even have a tatoo, onto a biomedical pathway of sterility and loss of sexual functioning in later years. This is a medical scandal and at last it is being debated more openly in the wake of the Cass Report.
The second point is separate and relates to Dr MacFarlane's allusion to the false memory debate, with a favoured partisan champion being Professor Chris French. He was on the advisory board of the British False Memory Society (I think that this has now collapsed here, as it did its version in the USA). Psychologists defending this partisan approach (such as French and the recently deceased Martn Conway and his colleagues) captured the policy position of the British Psychological Society (BPS) after the 1990s, hence me citing the paper I co-authored with Ashley Conway (no relation to MC) on this matter. This is a matter of historical fact, and as a result the policy convergence remains contentious within the BPS, especially from clinicians working with survivors of abuse or those who are survivors themself. It also keeps returning, like a bad penny, in the Royal College of Psychiatristists, where, in my view, it has been dealt with in a more balanced way than in the BPS, but is still unresolved.
The biased focus by both the BPS and the BFMS, on false positives in legal decision making, means that false negatives are systematically ignored. This affords a policy emphasis, which betrays survivors of child sexual abuse by ignoring their collective case. We now have extensive evidence that the latter are under-recognised as traumatised victims of sexual crime in childhood, as the findings of the recent statutory inquiry into historical abuse demonstrated, as did the Childrens Commissioner, whose report indicated a nine-fold under-reporting of child sexual abuse (CSA) in England.
To use a summary from the sociologist Stanley Cohen, there is, to use his phraseology, widespread 'moral stupor' and 'chilling denial' about CSA and we are in a collective complict 'state of denial' about its prevalence and mental health impact. I expanded this case in my book 'Child Sexual Abuse: Moral Panic or State of Denial?' (Routledge, 2018) before the inquiry into historical abuse reported its confirnatory evidence very recently. In some ways the picture is actually worse than I thought, when writing my account.
Thus I am grateful to Dr MacFarlane for discussing both of these matters implicating child protection, even though we clearly have a different perspective on many aspects of each.