The Wild Child Read online

  Freud’s one close medical friend, Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist from Berlin, was also putting pressure on Freud in a different direction to abandon this view (Fliess’s son, Robert, became a prominent analyst and claimed, at the end of his life, that as a small child he had been abused by his father precisely at the point that Freud was communicating his belief in the pervasiveness of child abuse to his friend). Fliess had operated on Emma Eckstein, one of the major sources of Freud’s views on sexual abuse, with disastrous results: She nearly bled to death as a result of the bungled operation. Fliess insisted that the bleeding was “hysterical,” and that he was not responsible for it. The connection between hysterical bleeding and hysterical lying about sexual abuse was not lost on Freud.

  It is my hypothesis that these two forces together—peer pressure and the need to protect Fliess—pushed Freud in the direction of conforming to the standard view that any such accounts must be mistakes, lies, or wishes.

  But the letters in Freud’s papers (which I later published131 ) indicate that Freud had considerable clinical data to support his initial view that these reports of abuse were real. These letters are particularly valuable in that they provide us with the most elaborate accounts available in the literature of Freud’s actual clinical material. They permit a detailed look, too, at the climate in German-speaking countries, which was no doubt the same as it had been some sixty years earlier at the time of the case of Kaspar Hauser. Yet these letters had been omitted from the published record. One particularly poignant one, dated December 22, 1897, includes one of the rare fragments of Freud’s clinical work—a case history of a two-year-old girl who was anally raped by her father and nearly died as a result of the loss of blood. At the end of this letter Freud has this cri de coeur: “A new motto: ‘What have they done to you, poor child?’ This is a line from a poem by Goethe, from his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96), and is put in the mouth of the strange, androgynous character Mignon. She sings a song to Wilhelm Meister that begins: “Do you know the country where the lemon trees flower, and the golden oranges glow in the dark foliage…?” The line could serve as a motto to the story of Kaspar Hauser as well. But the sympathy Freud shows for the suffering of this patient was not permitted to stand. This passage was omitted from the published letters, and Freud’s motto, along with it, was removed from the record. Freud meant it to be the rallying cry of his new science, but for whatever reason—a loss of personal courage, a change of mind—he caved in and adapted himself to the prevailing wisdom that such things simply could not happen in a civilized country.132 Without these early letters, and their unedited version of what Freud really believed at the time, and what actual clinical material he had in front of him, we really did not have a history of Freud’s views so much as an official account. Even if one disagreed (and almost all psychoanalysts do) with my interpretation of these documents, it is incontestable that the new letters and other documents I found in various archives in Europe raised important new questions for any complete history of the discovery of child sexual abuse. They were also of significance in the larger debate about trauma and memory.

  For if sexual abuse was the primary subject of these “lost” letters, they raised the larger question of trauma, or abuse in general. Was physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological abuse (including neglect), and the myriad other ways a child could be deprived of the nourishment necessary for a happy adulthood, the source of all later human unhappiness? Was psychoanalysis a traumatogenic theory of the neuroses—in other words, was all later neurosis caused by early childhood experiences of abuse in some form or other? I thought it was. There is a sense in which Kaspar Hauser’s case seems to prove the opposite: His early deprivations apparently gave him greater happiness (or, in any event, security) than did his later fame in the larger world, which brought him only unhappiness. But to speak of his “happiness” in his dungeon may have only been a device that enabled Kaspar to speak of how unhappy he was made later. He suffered a different series of deprivations once he was discovered, and different kinds of trauma, and it is always difficult to compare traumas. Moreover, we do not know the full extent of what Kaspar Hauser suffered in his dungeon.

  The effects of trauma and deprivation are not a subject that could be tested in a laboratory. One could not subject a human being to various forms of deprivation in order to see if he or she would develop a neurosis as was inhumanely done with animals. Nonetheless a vast source of data was case histories of patients in therapy (as long as the recorder was not allowing bias to interfere with the recounting), as well as accounts of historical cases of abuse (to the extent that society permitted such stories to be published).133

  Kaspar Hauser was of obvious psychiatric interest, and I am puzzled by the fact that Freud never refers to the case in any of his letters or published writings.

  But other accounts were of particular interest to Freud, and raise issues similar to those in the case of Kaspar Hauser. One was the story of the “psychotic” Doctor Daniel Paul Schreber.134 He was the presiding judge in an appellate court, who wrote a detailed account of his own illness, Memoirs of My Mental Illness (recently reprinted by Harvard University Press). On the basis of this work, Freud in 1911 published “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” (S.E. vol. 12), which was the first attempt to account in a serious manner for the genesis of paranoid psychosis from a theoretical point of view. It was the first and only time that Freud wrote extensively about a patient whom he had never met and who was still alive at the time of writing, Schreber believed, that he was being “unmanned” that is, castrated and turned into a woman for the sexual enjoyment of God. Freud interpreted this belief as a fantasy—in fact a desire, and a homosexual one, directed at his psychiatrist, a surrogate for the father. But Freud ignored the fact that Schreber’s psychiatrist, Emil Paul Flechsig, had in fact practiced castration on his female patients. Freud may also not have known that Schreber’s father practiced a series of sadistic experiments on the child, almost all of which were later incorporated into the so-called psychotic delusions of the adult Schreber.135

  All this is relevant to so-called false memories, or even false reports, because in fact very few data on the actual statistics of false reports have ever been collected. We are left with people’s impressions. There were many who doubted, on no very solid ground, the story of Kaspar Hauser, and claimed that he fabricated his early life of trauma, just as there are people today who believe no account of abuse. I have no doubt that there must be some false memories, but I seriously doubt that the percentage of them, compared to genuine memories, is significant (just as there are, occasionally, recantations of rape accusations, but their number is minuscule). And just as false memories are rare, so too is fabrication rare.136 They can only constitute a tiny minority of all accusations.137

  On the other hand, there are actual data on the forgetting of real events that were traumatic and sexual in nature (too often the research on forgetting and remembering focuses on trivial matters that have little impact on the emotional lives of the subjects).138 These data cannot be ignored if we wish to consider the possibility that Kaspar Hauser did not remember everything that had happened to him while he was in prison.139 An important article appeared in 1994: “Recall of Childhood Trauma: A Prospective Study of Women’s Memories of Child Sexual Abuse.”140 It was the first time that a large number of women (129) could be interviewed in adult life about experiences they had in childhood (according to hospital records). The results showed that a large proportion of the women (38 percent) did not recall the abuse that had been reported seventeen years earlier. What Linda Williams shows is that it is precisely repeated abuse, and especially abuse by a close family member, that is most likely to be forgotten. She does not explore why this might be so, but it is not difficult to perceive a psychological reason: The betrayal, the confusion, is much greater. A onetime abuse by a stranger is more likely to be reported, because one ca
n count, to some extent, on being believed and being given comfort. (To whom would Kaspar Hauser have turned? The only experience he knew was his, there was nothing to contrast it to.) Sixteen percent of the women who recalled the abuse stated that there had been a time in the past when they did not remember that the abuse had happened. An example of one of the cases is given: “In one instance, the young woman told the interviewer that she was never sexually abused as a child, and she repeatedly and calmly denied any sexual abuse experiences throughout the detailed questioning. She was then asked if anyone in her family had ever gotten into trouble for his or her sexual behavior, and she said no and then spontaneously added, “Oh, wait a minute, could this be something that happened before I was born?” When told that it could, she said, “My uncle sexually assaulted someone.” Later she said the following:

  I never met my uncle (my mother’s brother), he died before I was born. You see, he molested a little boy. When the little boys mother found out that her son was molested, she took a butcher knife and stabbed my uncle in the heart, killing him.

  The interviewer (unaware of the circumstances of this woman’s victimization) recorded the details of this account of the uncles death and completed the interview:

  A comparison with the original account of the abuse recorded in 1974 revealed that this participant (at age 4), her cousin (at age 9), and her playmate (at age 4) were all abused by the uncle. The records of the earlier research revealed that when this participant told her mother about the abuse, her mother, in turn, informed the mother of the playmate, a little boy. This boy’s mother, according to newspaper accounts available in the case files, armed herself with a knife and then went looking for the uncle. She stabbed him five times, killing him. The participant in the present study apparently did not recall that she was abused by this man.

  The debate over the recovery of memories and the possibility of forgetting trauma is directly relevant to any study of Kaspar Hauser. It would be pure speculation to suggest what may have happened to him in his dungeon. We have almost no clues, and Kaspar Hauser himself provided few data. He remembered almost nothing. However, he did recover some memories, and might, over the course of a normal lifetime, have recovered many more. He was never given the opportunity. From his case, we know that language can act as a moderator. When there is no language, or language is poorly developed, forgetting is particularly easy. According to the authoritative work by Diana Russell, 38 percent of women spontaneously remember having been sexually abused before the age of 18.141 The vast majority of these women have always remembered the abuse and did not require therapy to recover the memory. What we cannot know, of course, is how many of the other 62 percent of women, with no memory of abuse, have either forgotten the abuse or simply refuse to talk about it. Many women learn to their chagrin that society often simply turns a blind eye to their memories of pain, either genuinely disbelieving them or claiming to. Many people did not want to believe Kaspar Hauser, refused to believe him, and found it easier by far to claim that he was inventing, fabricating, that his fantasies had carried him away, that he was a hysteric—in short, he was treated like a woman.

  Precious little research has been done on the memories of children who survived traumas—the Holocaust, for example. It is simply said that such experiences cannot be repressed. I find that idea implausible, but it is an empirical question and could presumably be answered by the necessary research. The importance of these questions to the veracity of memories of sexual abuse in childhood is obvious. Little is actually known on the topic of forgetting traumatic memories. How different, for example, is a three-year-old’s memory of a traumatic event from that of a twelve-year-old? What difference does the extent of the trauma make? And is there something unique about a sexual trauma? Is it not possible that there are no general rules, and that each person will react differently, some forgetting permanently, some repressing, some remembering permanently, and some simply unwilling to talk about it, ever, with anyone? How can we be certain that Kaspar Hauser did not belong to this latter group, and simply elected not to talk about certain things he knew? After all, he emerged from his “cage” at sixteen. Just days before, he was locked up, experiencing things he could not have forgotten in just a day or two, even if he only acquired the necessary linguistic skills to speak of them some weeks or months or years later.142

  I have long been intrigued by the term “soul murder” (found in Feuerbach’s book about Kaspar Hauser), not because of the word, but because of the idea behind it: that a crime can be committed against a persons very being.143 This was Feuerbach’s idea, and it suggests that interest in the actual abuse of Kaspar Hauser may not be confined to the modern age. Perhaps fascination of the European world of the nineteenth century with the story of Kaspar Hauser represented a hidden acknowledgment of the reality of child abuse. Kaspar Hauser was abused by his parents or parent when he was abandoned as a newborn infant; abused by whoever kept him for twelve or fourteen or sixteen years locked in a dungeon; abused by Lord Stanhope for political reasons; abused by an unknown assailant who tried to murder him for reasons that could only have been obscure to Kaspar Hauser; and finally abused by the man who stabbed him to death. Because this death took three days to happen, he was abused one final time by his “teacher” Herr Meyer, who let it be known both to Kaspar himself and to anyone else he encountered that the wound was superficial, not in the least deadly, and when it was clear that Kaspar was dying from this superficial wound, that the wound was in fact self-inflicted in a misguided and unsuccessful attempt to bring attention to himself.

  It was hard to be more abused than Kaspar Hauser. For all the thousands of children who were abused in more mundane ways—sometimes less deadly but at others equally murderous in intent and often in fact—who were invisible, here was a “case” that could not be ignored. It was like the return of the repressed. Kaspar Hauser represented, I believe, the objective proof of something that many suspected: Children were hated, hurt, and often murdered for reasons that made no sense. It was the most denied fact of the nineteenth century, just as child sexual abuse was the most denied fact of the twentieth.144 In the nineteenth century it was claimed that nobody except a monster could harm a child, and that when it did occur, it would be so rare as to deserve mention in the newspapers. Indeed, French and German newspapers reserved sections for just this kind of report. Yet severe physical punishment was practiced, routinely, in families, where fathers felt it their prerogative to beat their children for any and all infractions of self-designed prohibitions. In schools, physical punishment was the rule, not the exception, and there is even a well-documented case of a girl who died, not from the beating but as a result of the humiliation she experienced during the caning of her bare bottom.145 In the twentieth century the same thing has been said about sexual abuse. One in a million, perhaps, was the incidence rate the psychiatric textbooks claimed for incest as late as 1975.146 Yet some of the people who denied such abuse were well aware that it happened, since they were in fact the perpetrators. Others, who possibly preferred not to think about it, were victims. Among the “public,” then, were both victims and perpetrators, two classes of people, large in number, who knew that this denied fact was actual and real. Kaspar Hauser, like a symptom, allowed the public to dwell on and think about the consequences of child abuse without having to acknowledge what they were actually thinking about. Kaspar Hauser himself knew that people suffered for something they had never done. Meyer claimed that he simply could not get Kaspar Hauser to understand that suffering in this world would be compensated for in the next, and that Kaspar insisted that “there were people who suffered deeply, through no fault of their own.”147

  The modern reader (could it have been any different for readers in the last century?), including myself, desperately wants to reconstruct Kaspar Hauser’s actual feelings, memories, and experiences while he was in his dungeon. We want to know if this story is true and, if so, what it says about human nature—that is, what
does it mean for us? Do we all suffer from what Freud called “the family romance”—a feeling that our family of origin cannot possibly be the humble one we already know about, but must be a far more noble one that we do not know about? Freud thought this was a universal longing. We see it in the fantasies about children raised by wolves, and see, too, that it can be realistic: The Indian wolf-children, Amala and Kamala, of whom I write in the appendix on wolf-children, would have been better off among the wolves than in an Indian orphanage.