Significant Moments: Defamation Vs. Talking About Defamation

In the 1990s I read personal facts about a federal official I had admired. I read that she was especially close to her father, and that her father's death was an especial loss for her. I was deeply moved. I was inspired to write the following creative piece about Anna Freud and her relationship with her father, Sigmund Freud. (In fact, I had dedicated this piece to the federal official; on Friday January 15, 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered me to delete personal references to the official on my blog.)

http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2006/11/her-fathers-daughter-anna-and-freud.html

The piece discusses child abuse and the contentious dispute in the psychoanalytic discipline between analysts who attribute psychological problems to the individual's intrapsychic fantasy, and, on the other hand, analysts who recognize the importance of childhood abuse, particularly child sexual abuse, in the origins of a person's psychological disturbance.

I sense the operation of the "repetition compulsion" -- the uncanny -- in my being inspired to write the piece at the outset (in the 1990s) after reading about a particular federal official; the content of the piece itself (namely, child abuse, and the recognition or denial of the perpetration of child abuse); and ultimately, the unintended consequence, years later, in January 2010, of arousing the ire of the U.S. Department of Justice in writing about the federal official in question.

I find the following line in my creative piece to be uncanny:

One was allowed . . .
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
. . . to perform these acts but not to speak of them.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
There was no taboo on the commission of incest, only a taboo on speaking about incest.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.


In my own case, the observation is a metaphor. My former employer, the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld was permitted, with impunity, to file false, defamatory statements about me to the effect that I was potentially violent, but I am forbidden to complain on this blog that I was defamed. "In the District of Columbia, there is no taboo on filing false, defamatory statements about another person alleging that he is potentially violent, only a taboo on speaking about someone filing false, defamatory statements alleging that someone is potentially violent."

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Here is a more expansive excerpt from the piece:

There exists, as far as I know (I looked without success), not a single published account of the devastating effects of incest or childhood sexual abuse before Freud’s time. And yet if this was happening to anything like the extent that is true today—and why should it be any different?—then at least one in three women, possibly more, in the general population had been exposed to a forced and unwanted sexual advance during childhood. In other words, sexual abuse of one form or another was the core trauma of many women’s lives, yet there was total silence about it.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
In the tradition we are dealing with, . . .
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
. . . one was allowed . . .
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
. . . to perform these acts but not to speak of them.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
There was no taboo on the commission of incest, only a taboo on speaking about incest.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
As a scientist . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . had an almost unique opportunity.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Here was a man, possibly the first in recorded history, who heard about the sexual abuse of children and recognized what it really meant.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
At that time, had one man put up a fight, it would have had wide repercussions.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
For Freud to have broken that taboo of silence was, to my mind, one of the great moments of history.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
And yet—
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Later, in one of the most famous retractions in the history of ideas, Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . contrary to the truth . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
. . . had recanted.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
As he put it in 1925 in An Autobiographical Study: “I was at last obliged to recognize that the scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.”
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Freud’s earliest insights . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
. . . about child abuse . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . would only reemerge much later, provoking a host of other episodes.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.