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Abstract In this conference paper, I explore a complex struggle between proponents of the #MeToo movement and rising proponents of the #MenToo movement, which gathered traction following Johnny Depp's public defamation trial of unfounded allegations of domestic violence by his ex-wife Amber Heard in 2022. In the case against Weinstein, Cynthia Burr, who had been forced into having oral sex with Weinstein in the 1970s commented on how Weinstein was now going to feel how she feit: \"Humiliation, worthlessness, fear, weakness, aloneness, loss, suffering and embarrassment\" (Kantor and Twohey, pp. 184-185). In his article, \"A Male Perspective on Sex and Power in the Age of #MeToo (2020), David Lotto endeavors to answer this question firom a male perspective: \"Men have a great deal of resentment and anger at being at a disadvantage in the arena of sexual power, specifically the reality that most of the time, in most situations, particularly around the initiation of the sexual relationship, it is the woman who has far more control than the man\" (p. 199) As a result of this perceived lack of sexual power, Lotto claims that if a man's sexual advances are rejected, he will seek revenge for inflicted narcissistic wounds.1 From a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective in which the narcissistic injury is suffered, one suggestion Lotto provides for why men commit sexual harassment is that there is a difference between women as mothers and women as sexually desirable: \"The female power role 1 An excerpt of this paragraph canbe found in my article, \"He Desires Me; He Loves Me Not\": \"MeToo and an Analysis of Freudian Sexual Economics.\" Clio's Psyche, vol. 26.2, Winter 2020, pp. 231-235. or attribute ... is not that of the nurturing caretaker whose power is that of the adult in comparison to the child, but of the one who holds the power of sexual desirability.

Freud conducted a study to prove his hypothesis using six men and twelve women9 divided into three groups: the first group comprised patients assaulted by strangers; the second, patients abused by close family members; and the third, patients who had sexual relations as children with siblings.10 With regard to the second group, Freud makes it clear that he is able to extract memories of the adults' childhood experiences, i.e., their initiation into incestuous sexual relations by an adult member of the family who believes that the sexual relationship is founded on physical and emotional love and who is able to project this belief onto his victims.11 Freud discovers that \"the idea of these infantile sexual scenes is very repellent to the feelings of sexually normal individuals; they include all the abuses known to debauched and impotent persons, among whom the buccal cavity and the rectum are misused for sexual purposes. [...]of what one should deduce to be an example of faulty reasoning, the child who sought what Abraham coined as pleasure-gain, i.e., either fore-pleasure or satisfaction-pleasure, is guilty, in a way, of provoking the assault: \"the child had yielded to the attraction of doing something forbidden, and it now has the feeling that the accident is its own fault. The possibility cannot be ruled out that psychotics project their sexual phantasies back into childhood, but in none of the cases to which I have referred is there any cause for such a suspicion. [...]in cases of dementia praecox we can easily distinguish between delusional and factual reports.77 Abraham noticed that many patients who displayed symptoms of dementia praecox also told stories of sexual abuse. According to Freud, sexual difficulties may arise when the female caregiver unwittingly arouses the young child sexually when taking care of his or her hygienic needs and when breastfeeding.

This paper is part of a larger project on Catholic writer Antonia White’s series of autobiographical novels, Frost in May, The Lost Traveller, and The Sugar House, in which readers are presented with a Freudian Oedipal drama that reaches a dramatic climax in the last autobiographical novel in the series, Beyond the Glass, where the main protagonist spirals into psychosis. A central question addressed is whether or not White’s autobiographical fiction is an unconscious projection of sexual trauma from her own history. Psychoanalytically speaking, the answer depends upon whether one subscribes to Freudian or Ferenczian perspectives. The paper also addresses the question of whether White’s accounts of psychosis in her autobiographical fiction are real and meaningful descriptions of lived traumatic experiences. Jacques Lacan asserts that it is impossible to authenticate narratives of psychosis and for readers to draw any meaningful value from them because they lack a coherent transfer of metaphorical language from the unconscious to the conscious in the pursuit of truth of a lived experience. He uses Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness to support his case, a text in which Schreber confesses to only being able to communicate his experiences in similes and metaphors; therefore, he claims his experiences cannot be understood. I argue that Lacan does not give due credit to Schreber’s attempts to grapple with spiritual and sexual preservation in the throes of delusion through the agency of his alter egos. These alter egos are the other “self,” a deluded self that offers, paradoxically, truth to emotional experience of a man’s ego in crisis. Schreber shares these pursuits with White’s alter egos in her autobiographical fiction, “The House of Clouds” and Beyond the Glass. In an analysis of White’s texts as recollections of her personal history, I highlight how White’s experiences shape her testimony in its raw portrayal of an identity in crisis.

In Catholic writer Antonia White’s series of autobiographical novels, Frost in May, The Lost Traveller, The Sugar House, and Beyond the Glass, readers are presented with a Freudian Oedipal drama that sends the main protagonist spiraling into psychosis and then back into her father’s arms upon recovery. This trajectory draws a parallel with White’s history. Literary critics and biographers on White have suggested that she was a victim of father-daughter incest. My aim in this thesis, however, is not to prove that White was a victim of sexual abuse. I seek to illustrate the limitations and possibilities of validating sexual trauma in autobiographical fiction using White’s diaries as scaffolding for this examination. This thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter One is an analysis of a problematic Oedipal drama in White’s autobiographical fiction that leads to a proposed theoretical conundrum in psychoanalytical concepts of sexual trauma and psychosis. Chapter Two is a study of the form and theory of the autobiographical novel and the author-protagonist relationship. Also, at the intersection of psychoanalytic and literary theoretical paradigms, I explore the extent to which White’s metaphorical descriptions of psychosis generate a coherent depiction of self and lived traumatic experience within the confines of an Oedipal narrative. In so doing, I propose a space be carved for White’s experiences to be taken seriously as authentic expressions of trauma. Chapter Three explores larger socio-cultural patriarchal attitudes of women’s sexuality in which I draw parallels between Freud’s construction of the incest barrier and religious notions of female sexuality. In Chapter Four I juxtapose literary and clinical writings of contemporary trends on sexual trauma, memory, and betrayal to illustrate the shifts in focus and yet subtle presence of Freud’s Oedipus complex theory in Western society today.