Reading a Text Correctly As It Stands

Chapter 36-43 will be concerned with some aspects of the methodology of textual analysis. One technique, the morphological method, was described in chapter 30. – Some analytic techniques are highly advanced and complex. Others are simple. The most fundamental aspect is the ability to read a text as it stands: to perceive what is in the most manifest way stated in a text; not to be blind of some of its unambiguous contents, style and other features; and, furthermore, not to fancy the presence of other contents and style etc., of which no trace can be found in the text. Such blindness and fantasies are particularly frequent if the text contains persuasive techniques directed toward the reader.

In the three seduction articles of 1896 Freud (GW-I:440/SE-III:204) unambiguously stated that his patients had told nothing about having been sexually seduced or abused. They had ardently denied having had such experiences. It was exclusively Freud's own interpretation that they had so, and that these experiences constituted the cause of their present symptoms. Moreover, Freud applied brutal persuasion techniques to force the patients to believe in his preconceived interpretations.

In The Assault on Truth Jeffrey Masson (1984) quotes the third seduction paper in toto as an appendix. However, in the main text Masson claims that Freud's patients entirely on their own initiative told about sexual abuse; that Freud believed them in the beginning; and that he was right in believing them. Masson goes on to say that Freud later rejected "the patients' accounts" as fantasies, and that he was wrong in doing so.

During the entire 1980s thousands of scholars and laymen participated in a worldwide debate about the relevant writings by Freud and Masson. Despite my comprehensive reading of and listening to these contributions, I did not encounter a single debater who did not imagine that Masson's account of Freud's text was correct. Freud had supposedly written in his third seduction paper that the patients had recounted these kinds of experiences. The only thing the debaters disagreed about was whether Freud was gullible when he in the beginning believed his patients' narratives, or whether he was a coward when he later rejected them.

I am by no means the only researcher who has documented the widespread absence of the ability to read a text as it stands. For obvious reason I cannot devote much space to this topic here. But on account of the subject matter of this book, a legal example is called for. I shall choose one provided by Thomas Eriksson (1994a, 1994b), who was at that time a psychiatrist at that Swedish prison to which those convicted of sexual abuse of children would primarily serve their sentence. The teenage girl who accused her grandfather of abuse is called "Judith" in Scharnberg (1996). Important analyses of the evidence have also been presented by Edvardsson (1997).

Here we shall only look at the facts presented by Eriksson. Judith was a drug addict. Since she was in a psychotic state the police interrogation was held at the hospital. Neither the police, nor the prosecutor, the judges or the first defence counsel who handled the case in both the district court and the court of appeal (before the case was re-opened), detected that it was not the girl who accused her grandfather, but the social welfare officer at the hospital who answered "in her place".

If correct reading of a text is the most elementary fundament of the methodology of textual analysis, the second level consists of juxtaposition and comparison. Here I shall formulate a general rule of great importance: Even in the absence of any specific rules about what should be juxtaposed and compared, and how it should be compared, the very fact that something is indeed juxtaposed and compared will not infrequently produce significant information.

Both the above-mentioned examples aptly illustrate this pattern. It seems that neither the prosecutor nor the judges had compared Judith's statement with those by the social welfare officer.

Let us assume that those tens of thousands of scholars who debated Masson?s view, had read his book including the appendix. If they had, they clearly failed to compare Freud's and Masson's texts.

At the present stage it may not be possible to formulate an exhaustive set of rules about how to use juxtaposition and comparison. But it should not be controversial to say that what the researcher or the investigator needs more than anything else, is the special eye or gaze for what pieces of information it might pay to juxtapose.




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Uppdaterad: 2009-11-19

Yakida