by Richard Beck
The bill, which one observer described as “one of the most heavily lobbied human services bills” the country had ever seen, passed through both houses of Congress, but in December of 1971 President Richard Nixon vetoed the Act.22 The veto’s language was direct: “For the Federal Government to plunge headlong financially into supporting child development would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over [and] against the family-centered approach.”23 This was a major defeat for NOW and also for Minnesota senator Walter Mondale, who had introduced and sponsored the Comprehensive Child Development Act. The significance of Nixon’s use of the word “communal” was easy to understand in Cold War America, and he went on to say that the bill had “family-weakening implications.”
When Mondale then made a second attempt at passing major child-welfare legislation, he made sure not to repeat his earlier political mistake. On March 13, 1973, just a few years before he would join Jimmy Carter’s ticket as a candidate for vice president, Mondale introduced a piece of legislation called the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. The act created a National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect to supervise and track research, instituted a program of grants to fund abuse prevention initiatives, and established a commission of nongovernmental observers to study the effectiveness of reporting and other prevention laws. “Development,” with all its connotations of social engineering and government-run child rearing, was out.
A Senate Subcommittee on Children and Youth held hearings on the bill over the course of four days in the spring of 1973. Senator Mondale chaired the subcommittee, and he kept a tight grip on proceedings as several dozen witnesses testified. Two witnesses in particular caught the attention of Mondale, the other members of the subcommittee, and the national press. The first was David Gil, a professor of social policy at Brandeis University. In the late 1960s, Gil worked with the US Children’s Bureau to publish the findings of the most comprehensive series of child abuse studies that had been conducted to date. He was one of the country’s preeminent experts on the social and economic contexts of child abuse.24 When he appeared to testify before the subcommittee, however, Mondale did everything he could to make sure that Gil was ignored. It was in the interest of appeasing more conservative members of the subcommittee that Mondale had used the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to sever physical and sexual abuse from other social problems in the first place—the bill was specifically designed to keep economic and racial inequality out of the conversation. So when Gil began to raise exactly those issues in his testimony, Mondale rushed to defuse the situation before things got out of hand. Although “physical abuse of children is known to occur in all strata of our society,” Gil said, “the incidence rate seems significantly higher among deprived and discriminated-against segments of the population.” Mondale immediately asked Gil whether he would yield for a question:
Mondale: Would you not say that the incidence of child abuse is found as well in the families of middle-class parents?
Gil: Definitely so.
Mondale: And upper income parents?
Gil: Yes.
Mondale: While the incidence may strike the poor, as you later argue, more heavily than the rest, yet this is a national phenomenon that is not limited to the very poor.
Gil: Definitely.
Mondale: You may go into some of the finest communities from an economic standpoint and find child abuse as you would in the ghettos of this country.25
Gil, an extremely courteous witness throughout his testimony, agreed again, but he tried once more to make the point that Mondale hoped to avoid. He acknowledged that “the factors that lead to abuse among the well-to-do are the same that also lead to abuse among the poor,” but Gil also tried to point out that “the poor have in addition many more factors.”
“I know you are going to get to that,” Mondale replied. “But this is not a poverty problem; it is a national problem.”26
A subsequent witness did a better job of describing this national problem in terms that pleased the Senate subcommittee. Mondale and his colleagues heard from a woman who lived in Southern California’s Redondo Beach. She testified under the pseudonym Jolly K. In 1967, as Jolly K told the Senate subcommittee, she had been seeing a psychiatric social worker named Leonard Lieber. She wanted to figure out why she had abused her child and how she could keep herself from doing it again. Jolly K had abused her daughter on two occasions: once by strangling her for lying and another time by throwing “a rather large kitchen knife” at her from across the room.27 One day Lieber suggested to his twenty-nine-year-old patient that she speak to another patient of his who was working through similar problems. The pair became a small group, and then the group became a larger group, and eventually Lieber and Jolly K gave the group a name: Parents Anonymous. In her testimony, which she delivered with her psychiatrist seated nearby, Jolly K described how she had abused her child—verbally, aside from the two incidents previously mentioned—and provided a psychological explanation for her acts.
Jolly K: To simplify it, to me this child reflected my negative self, who I viewed for years as a rather rotten, worthless person due to the fact I was raised much similarly to the way she was raised in the first 6½ years.
Mondale: Is that what psychologists call where you hate something you sense in yourself?
Jolly K: Yes. It is kind of like who is the abuse for. You are using the body of the child but it is your identity. Is it homicide or is it extended suicide?28
Jolly K further reassured the subcommittee with her description of the typical Parents Anonymous member. “The average parent in our group,” she said, “is middle class, white, educated to anywhere from 10th grade on up.”29 The average member was, in other words, not black, not poor—not a member of the groups that most interested David Gil. The contrast between Jolly K and Professor Gil was so obvious that Mondale asked Jolly K about it directly:
Mondale: You heard Dr. Gil before you. . . . Don’t you think there is some value in identifying these extreme cases of the kind you personally experienced, that you try to deal with those the best we can while society is being perfected, but not wait for a perfect society?
Jolly K: We have to. It is ridiculous. It is way too idealistic to assume—well, let me go back to the national priorities. . . . I think we need to look at the more fundamental, more realistic things of working with the person where they are and giving them the inner resources to go on after some more realistic things on their own, such as the motivation to want to go back to adult schools.30
The focus on individual psychology, the dismissal of sociological idealism, the appeal to the individual’s “inner resources” as the key to preventing further abuse—Jolly K’s testimony accomplished everything Mondale could have hoped for. When the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act became law in 1974, the medical and psychiatric conception of abuse that had begun to take shape in the 1950s finally became not only a matter of media hype and professional opinion but of federal policy. It remains the consensus view today.
When Jolly K told Walter Mondale that the child she abused had “reflected her negative self,” when she suggested that her anger and violence were the products of her own childhood, when she wondered aloud whether her aim was “homicide” or “suicide,” she was speaking a particular language. This language had been invented and refined in Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It had made its formal American debut in 1909, and by the middle of the century it dominated the way Americans talked about and understood themselves and one another to an extent that can now be difficult to understand or believe. One did not have to receive any specialized training or certification to learn the language—it would be more accurate to say that it diffused throughout society through writers and editors in the mass media, advertising of all kinds, and the popularizing works of academics. The language of Sigmund Freud an
d psychoanalysis was simply a basic part of the mental atmosphere in which midcentury Americans lived and breathed, and it provided much of the rhetorical foundation for the panic that would eventually begin in the early 1980s.
Freudian thought played a central role in the history of American attitudes and beliefs about child abuse, because the Freudian account of human experience is, at its core, an account of the persistence of childhood throughout adult life. In Freudian psychology, childhood fantasies, traumas, and dreams determine the shape and character of adult desires. Should these desires cause sufficient mental distress to the adult who experiences them, they can be pushed into the realm of unconscious thought—but not forever. Freud also held that these uncomfortable desires make themselves known during sleep, presented by dreams in a kind of code that draws on fragments of childhood memory and the events of the previous day. Freud’s most famous psychological concepts, including penis envy and the Oedipus complex, were all derived from childhood. (Many commentators have noted that Freud devoted many more pages of writing to the analysis and interpretation of childhood sexuality than he did to the sexual lives of adults.) In the middle of the twentieth century, Freudian thought provided Americans with a way of understanding the relationship between childhood and adult life. As the public began to re-acknowledge the existence of child abuse in the sixties and early seventies, it instinctively drew on a vocabulary with which it was already intimately familiar and that seemed perfectly suited to explaining the subject at hand.
The sixties and seventies, however, were also a period during which everyday Freudian orthodoxy came under attack. The first group to challenge Freud’s theories and their persistence in American culture was the women’s liberation movement. This effort began in 1963, when a journalist and magazine writer named Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Opening with its rousing analysis of “the problem that has no name,” Friedan’s book identified the widespread boredom and despair of educated housewives as the product of systematic social oppression. “I seem to sleep so much,” one Long Island woman told her. “I don’t know why I should be so tired. . . . It’s not the work. I just don’t feel alive.”31 In addition to her discussions of the role played by media in encouraging women to find total fulfillment at home, the paralyzing psychological effects of trying to fill an entire day with housework, and the way university professors told women to give up their worldly ambitions just as the women gained the skills and knowledge to realize them, Friedan devoted an entire chapter to what she called “The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud.” It was the opening salvo in a war that would last for more than twenty years.
“It would be half-wrong to say it started with Sigmund Freud,” Friedan wrote. “It did not really start, in America, until the 1940s.”32 The “it” in those sentences did not refer to Freud’s ideas themselves—“No one can question the basic genius of Freud’s discoveries,” Friedan wrote—but to the way psychiatry and news magazines had applied these ideas to the lives of postwar women.33 Friedan believed that although Freud was an extraordinarily perceptive observer of human personality, his views on female sexuality had been irredeemably limited by the repressive culture in which he lived. Freud believed that women were docile and submissive by nature, that they were ill-suited to authority or public activity, and that when confronted with matters of sexuality, they tended to respond with hysterical outbursts.
Because Victorian culture really did punish people, especially women, who failed to repress their sexual desires, and because repression really did tend to produce hysterical neuroses, Freud’s ideas had been fairly well suited to their environment, even if they were also symptomatic of it. But Friedan believed that psychology had made many important advances in the first half of the twentieth century, that the profession, along with society itself, had moved somewhat beyond the repressive atmosphere in which it had been formed. In addition, the general situation of women had drastically changed. Many midcentury women, for example, had significant experience working outside the home, whereas none of Freud’s female upper-class Austrian patients led anything other than a completely domestic life. Friedan argued that her own era’s rigid adherence to Freudian doctrine was simply a product of the fact that psychoanalytic thought had become “the ideological bulwark of the sexual counter-revolution in America. Without Freud’s definition of the sexual nature of women to give the conventional image of femininity new authority, I do not think several generations of educated, spirited American women would have been so easily diverted from the dawning realization of who they were and what they could be.”34
By the middle of the 1970s feminists were holding Freud responsible for many aspects of sexual inequality, such that anti-Freudianism became one of the defining features of women’s liberation. Anne Koedt, in a classic work of early radical feminism, accused Freud of promoting the myth that women could only attain full sexual satisfaction through vaginal intercourse.35 The Freudian idea that a clitoral orgasm was just a pale imitation of its more mature vaginal manifestation, Koedt wrote, was a lie designed to make women feel that a life without a male partner was not a life worth living. Two other radical feminist intellectuals, Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone, carried out more general attacks, describing Freud, respectively, as the architect of a “domestic psychodrama more horrific than a soap opera” and “a petty tyrant of the old-school.”36 Anti-Freudianism became so commonplace among second-wave feminists that it sometimes became more of a shibboleth than an intellectual position. In her 1970 book The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer didn’t actually argue with psychoanalysis at all—she just cracked jokes. “Freud is the father of psychoanalysis,” she wrote. “It had no mother.”37 She referred to all of psychiatry as “an extraordinary confidence trick.”38 In Boston one women’s group kept a photograph of Freud on the wall so members would have a target for darts during their free time.39 These writers didn’t confine their criticisms to Freud’s theories either. Some feminists also tried to undermine psychoanalysis by half-ironically subjecting Freud himself to the psychoanalytic technique. Freud’s relationship with his mother—a “classic Jewish matriarch” with “a castrating and important personality”—came under suspicion, as did his rigidly monogamous marriage to Martha Bernays.40 Even by Victorian standards, Friedan suggested in The Feminine Mystique, Freud may have been unusually repressed.
To these psychoanalytic attacks on the founder of psychoanalysis, feminists, along with a number of dissidents from inside psychoanalysis itself, added important re-appraisals of Freud’s clinical practice. Florence Rush’s 1971 presentation on child abuse had first put the issue on the feminist agenda, but it wasn’t until 1977, when Rush published a lengthy essay in the journal Chrysalis, that feminism moved beyond scandalized “awareness” and began to form a plan of action. The essay was titled “The Freudian Coverup,” and it focused on an important sequence of events from the earliest stage of Freud’s career. Freud spent the middle years of the 1890s analyzing cases of hysteria with the physician Josef Breuer, and in 1896 Freud presented the startling results of this work at the Viennese Society for Psychiatry and Neurology.41 In almost every case of adult hysterical neurosis, Freud said, analysis had eventually uncovered traumatic childhood sexual abuse—he called it “seduction”—as the primary cause. The argument became known as the Seduction Theory, and for a brief period of time it was the foundation of Freud’s entire project. A year after his presentation at the Viennese Society, Freud wrote to a close friend, stating that he had adopted a new motto: “What has been done to you, poor child?”42 In correspondence Freud was completely carried away with enthusiasm for his new theory, referring to it as “the great clinical secret,” his first major discovery.43 “Just think,” he wrote in a jubilant letter from 1895, “among other things I am on the scent of the following strict precondition for hysteria, namely, that a primary sexual experience (before puberty), accompanied by revulsion and fright, must have taken place.”44
; Only two years after he presented “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” however, Freud began to back away from the Seduction Theory and its implications. The problem had to do with fitting the Seduction Theory in with the more general theories of neurosis, hysteria, and mental illness to which Freud subscribed at the time. One of these theories said that on its own, sexual abuse was not sufficient to produce the kinds of hysterical symptoms that could be discovered and analyzed in therapy. After all, not every victim of sexual abuse went on to become hysterical. In order for hysteria to develop later in life, other events and factors, both mental and environmental, must come into play. For Freud, this meant that the instances of childhood sexual abuse revealed by hysterical neurosis constituted only a fraction of the abuse that actually took place. In order for the Seduction Theory to be correct, therefore, childhood sexual abuse would have to be nearly universal in Victorian society, occurring within almost every household, and Freud ultimately decided that “such widespread perversions against children are not very probable.”45