In The assault on truth, Jeff Masson wrote:

On the evening of April 21, 1896, Sigmund Freud gave a paper before his colleagues at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, entitled The aetiology of hysteria. Freud realized that in giving this paper he would become “one of those who had disturbed the sleep of the world.” The address presented a revolutionary theory of mental illness. Its title refers to Freud’s new theory that the origin of neurosis lay in early sexual trauma. .. This is what later came to be called the “seduction theory” — namely, the belief that these early experiences were real, not fantasies, and had a damaging and lasting effect on the later lives of the children who suffered them.

Report was that Freud’s colleagues listened in stony silence. Masson shows how later Freud went into denial about the ‘seduction theory’ and took up a “cover story” approach based on the 1900 Interpretation of dreams. Many subsequent psychoanalytic theorists went different ways but also went into denial trips: For instance, Jung grounded his theory differently, in ‘archetypes’, but he showed his colors when he went on to work with the Nazis (mid 30s). [The most famous exception is Harry Stack Sullivan who legitimately grounded his psychoanalytic theory in social reality.]

Today Torrey has gone the same way, challenging the idea of progressive social change in his ultra-reactionary Freudian fraud. It is within this ideological climate that the clients must take on conventional psychology and try to find a progressive way to challenge society’s agenda for dealing with madness. Unless one can somehow find the way to transcend this seemingly omnipresent ideological environment, there seems to be no way to challenge the confining control process of psychotherapy in a political way. EXCEPT for the option of returning the same ‘medicine’, which is to say, adopting the technique of attack politics.

In the late 80s Jeff Masson used to own a Berkeley restaurant; I would drop by and chat with him from time to time. Jeff wrote a chapter in a later book about Sally Zinman’s story; he and I were initial members of the Board of Directors of the Berkeley Drop-In Center. But Jeff dropped out after one meeting and later he’d repeatedly tell me that he was “not political enough.” Today he is writing books about the feelings of animals and other ‘safe’ subjects, and we must consider where the place of political courage is to be for us!

Clearly the ‘challenge to the medical model’ requires of us that we don’t go into denial or other defensive mode regarding the aetiology (origins) of madness. The ‘old tradition’ of the clients movement was not clear on this, choosing in fact to view ‘opposition to the medical model’ as a personal choice, rather than a political choice (source: NAPA Principles of Unity). The ‘new tradition’ of the clients movement which is being organized by the Social Accountability tendency has chosen to advocate against the medical model in a political way. Within the purview of the client culture, this gets framed as opposition to attack politics.

Thus by ‘attack politics’ we mean that clients fight for power, for control under the cover of therapy’s socially respectable “assault on truth.” This does NOT mean that every assertive move is an ‘attack’ or that every act of rage reaches the level of full-blown attack politics. As with all conditions that are subject to social accountability, the identification of ‘attack politics’ is a matter of social judgment. The point for us is that we should work to improve the clients movement by way of principled opposition to ‘attack politics’.

Respectfully

Andrew Phelps