What Did Christine Blasey Ford Really Want?

If we learn nothing about what happened to Christine Blasey Ford thirty six years ago, the current discussion about sexual trauma is teaching us something about therapy. And, after all, that’s what we all want to know more about.

For example, Ford claimed that she raised the issue of her trauma in a couples counseling session. She said that she and her husband had been arguing in 2012 about installing a second door on their house. Intrepid researchers have discovered that the Fords requested a permit to build the door in 2008… thus manifestly contradicting the account that she gave her therapist in 2012.

Did she lie? Almost assuredly, she did. Why did she do it? I suspect that she did not want to expose the real reason that she and her husband were undergoing counseling: namely that their sex life had diminished significantly.

At the beginning of the Ford/Kavanaugh beat down, I wrote this:

Ford brought up the incident in couples counseling, when it could serve a purpose. Was her marriage failing? Were she and her husband headed for divorce? Had their sex life declined? Was she trying to elicit sympathy from her husband and her therapist?

Or, was she offering the kind of rationalization that makes sense to certain

narrative-loving therapists. That is, perhaps she was explaining that her sex drive had gone dormant because of the aftereffects of a trauma. For all we know, the situation was more complex. We do not know anything about the way her or her husband’s sex drive played out in their marriage. And we do not know the role that medication or hormones might have played.

In short, we know that she introduced the story to serve a purpose. Might this have led to a misremembering of what happened? We do not know. And we must allow for the fact that Ford believes completely that her memory is accurate... even though it is not accurate.

I would emphasize the point: Ford’s account of sexual assault served a purpose. It served to explain why the couple’s sex life had diminished. Of course, given their ages, the proximate cause might have nothing to do with the trauma and everything to do with biology. But, Ford chose not to explain the real reason.

I will add that Ford had reason to blame her marital difficulties on a sexual trauma. It relieved both her and her husband of all responsibility. We do not know anything about their interpersonal dynamic or their home life. It is easier to shift the blame and to accuse.

With this in mind, I will quote from an account offered by psychoanalyst Erica Komisar in the Wall Street Journal this morning. She shows us how psychoanalysis is currently practiced. This will show also why so few people still submit to this therapy:

Consider that according to Ms. Ford, she first told the story during therapy. The therapist’s role is different from that of a detective, journalist or lawyer. When a patient tells me a story, I don’t test it to see if it’s objectively accurate. I may help patients see things from a different perspective, but I never doubt the reality of what they are saying—or, as Sen. Cory Booker put it, of “her truth.” The therapist’s job is to empathize with and believe those in pain.

In many cases therapy leads patients to change the stories they tell themselves to heal their emotional wounds. A therapeutic narrative may be a mix of accurate and inaccurate memories, along with inferences to fill in the gaps. Like mythology or other literature, it can provide truthful insights into one’s inner life even if it doesn’t pass the test of objective accuracy.

As I said, in my book The Last Psychoanalyst, this is overpriced storytelling. Most sensible minds have long since overcome the tendency to consider it a treatment of any sort.

Komisar ignore the fact that Ford told the story in couples counseling, where it could serve a purpose. She, like most psychoanalysts, ignores the context and the purpose… preferring to send the patient scurrying off into her memory bank, the better to concoct a new and more satisfying story.

Patients sometimes seize hold of past traumas, because they explain what they have messed up in the present, and therefore tend to exonerate them for their own bad behavior. The patient who can shift the blame by concocting a meaning will avoid all responsibility.

As for the hidden truth that therapy is supposed to recover, we know that, for Freud, it meant simply that the patient was suffering from the trauma because she could not bear to admit that she had wanted to be molested. Today’s psychoanalysts would never suggest such a thing, but Freud himself is quite clear about it.

Case in point: Dora, a young woman whose case constitutes Freud’s longest study of hysteria. For the record, when Dora was sixteen, her father’s mistress’s husband made a move on her at a house by a lake. She slapped his face.

When she contracted some hysterical symptoms, Freud, a personal friend of her father-- if I recall correctly-- tried to persuade her that she was suffering because she really wanted to have an affair with the man. But that she could not admit it to herself. In a later iteration, Freud altered his view slightly and declared that Dora was really lusting after her father’s mistress… thus, that she was a closeted lesbian.

If you believe that this exercise will provide emotional solace,you have done too much therapy.

If one were to offer an alternative hypothesis, one would suggest that she might have imagined that her father had made a highly improper exchange: he had traded her to his mistress’s husband so that the man would not interfere in his affair.

One thing that is missing from these accounts is the notion that Dora might have been well within her rights, as a sixteen year old, to refuse a sexual entreaty from a man who she did not in any way desire.

Komisar obscures the truth that psychoanalysis is seeking out. And yet, if you go back in the literature, you will see that it involves accusing women of not knowing what they want. And it also says that if a woman becomes distraught over a proposition or an assault the reason can only be that she is denying her desire. If this is the hidden truth that psychoanalysis wants to reveal, it has condoned more than its fair share of sexual assault.