Jeffrey Masson and Freud's seduction theory: a new fable based on old myths
Allen Esterson
(Note: This is a
pre-publication version of the article published in History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1998, pp. 1-21. © 1998 SAGE Publications Ltd.)
Jeffrey Masson's version of the seduction theory episode in Freud's
early career, as presented in The Assault on
Truth (1984), is very plausible as a revised account of the traditional
story. However, close examination of the seduction theory papers and of other
contemporary documents reveals that Freud's later reports of the episode, the
foundation on which Masson builds his case, are false. Some purported
historical events that Masson uses to buttress his case are also shown to be
without foundation. The several accounts of the episode Freud gave in his
writings are dissected to demonstrate that they are tendentiously misleading
and serve to conceal what actually occurred with his patients during the period
in question. Some consequences of the widespread acceptance of the traditional
account are briefly discussed.
The re-evaluation of the seduction theory episode
According to the traditional story, Freud abandoned the seduction
theory when he realized that many of the 'seductions' reported by his female
patients were fantasies, and this discovery opened the way to his revolutionary
psychoanalytic theories of infantile sexuality. In the late 1970s, some
feminists concerned about the sexual abuse of female children re-examined the
received account and concluded that Freud was wrong to abandon the theory, and
that he did so in response to the concerted opposition of his medical
colleagues (Rush, 1977, 1980; Herman, 1981). Masson's best-selling The
Assault on Truth (1984) made this view known to a wider public, while at
the same time purportedly providing it with a more scholarly foundation.
Although most commentators expressed reservations about Masson's view that
Freud's reinterpreting his patients' reports of childhood sexual molestation as
fantasies indicated a failure of nerve on his part (ibid.: xxviii, 190), the
book has become highly influential, especially among some sections of the
psychotherapeutic community. And, in terms of the information provided by
Masson and the authors referred to above, it is not difficult to explain the
success of the revised account of the seduction theory episode. Indeed, seen in
those terms, what needs to be explained is why it took so long to re-evaluate
Freud's claims. (Feminist writers have found no difficulty in supplying such an
explanation.)
The traditional version derives essentially from Freud's account
in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933):
In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering
infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had
been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize in the end that these
reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical
symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences. (Freud, Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [hereafter
cited as S.E.]: XXII, 120) [1]
Now although Freud implied he had learnt to distinguish between the
patients' phantasies and their authentic memories (S.E.: VII: 274), he never
explained how he had done this, and, remarkably, until recently few people seem
to have asked how he could have done so. Given this unexplained gap at
the heart of Freud's account, Masson's revisionist view of the episode looks
like nothing more than common sense, and the rejection of his thesis by most
psychoanalytic commentators like a case of special pleading. But appearances
can be deceptive, and nowhere more so than in the field of received
psychoanalytic history.
The pressure technique
Salyard (1994: 659) writes that Freud's reasons for abandoning the
seduction theory have not been satisfactorily explained because little
attention has been given to the circumstances under which he claimed its
discovery.[2] She observes that this reflects the fact that Freud's published
writings were the source of the traditional account and the reason for its
announcement appears self-evident: Freud arrived at the theory because most of
his female patients reported sexual abuse in early childhood, usually by their
fathers. But, as Salyard notes, a close scrutiny of Freud's seduction theory
papers of 1896 reveals a very different state of affairs.
To appreciate what actually happened with Freud's patients in the
mid-1890s it is essential to have knowledge of his clinical technique at that
time. Details of Freud's methodology in this period are given in Studies
on Hysteria (Freud and Breuer, 1895: S.E., II). Central to his
procedure was the 'pressure technique', developed from a therapeutic device he
had seen used by Bernheim (S.E.: II, 109-10, 268-7). Freud believed that
somatic symptoms he regarded as hysterical were caused by repressed memories of
traumatic experiences, and that the therapeutic task was to induce the patient
to bring these memories to conscious awareness. At times when relevant thoughts
were not forthcoming he placed his hand on the patient's forehead and
encouraged him or her to report any images or ideas that came to mind. In the
event that nothing occurred to the patient, Freud took this as a sign of
resistance and repeated the pressure on the forehead while insisting that a
picture or an idea would emerge. In this manner he endeavoured to set in motion
a chain of associations which he believed would lead eventually to the
pathogenic idea (270-2). The ideas and images obtained from the patient by this
procedure generally emerged in a piecemeal fashion, with the essential elements
missing (281-2). The task of the physician was 'to put these [fragments] together
once more into the organization which he presumes to have existed'; ie, to
piece together the fragments to produce a coherent event or narrative, rather
like the process of solving a picture puzzle (291).
Even when a patient had been convinced of the logical coherence of the
proposed solution, he or she often failed to recognize the ideas which formed
'the nucleus of the pathogenic organization' (300). Freud described as 'the
climax of [the procedure's] achievement in the way of reproductive thinking'
that 'it causes thoughts to emerge which the patient never recognizes as his
own, which he never remembers, although he admits the context calls for
them inexorably...' (272).
Arriving at the solution, however, was not an automatic process, and
required guidance from the physician. In order to facilitate the emergence of
appropriate associations, Freud wrote, it was 'of use if we can guess the way
things are connected up and tell the patient before we have uncovered it'
(295). And even more explicitly, in regard to 'the things that we have to
insist upon to the patient' he stated: 'The principal point is that I should
guess the secret and tell it to the patient straight out' (281). Just how
directive was Freud's procedure is indicated by his reporting that at times he
'laboriously forced some piece of knowledge on a patient' (299).
The therapeutic solution therefore consisted of both acknowledged and
unacknowledged material. The logical consistency, and the interconnection
between its various parts, served to justify Freud's confidence in the solution
at which he arrived (300-1). At each stage he looked to the occurrence of
'tension and signs of emotion' in the patient's face as indicators of the
authenticity of the emerging recollections (281). He also claimed that when the
patient gave utterance to the supposed pathogenic memory the symptom
diminished, or even temporarily vanished, and that the 'working-over' of the
pathogenic material resulted in its complete disappearance (296-7). (This
was not always borne out in the cases reported in Studies on Hysteria.)
What emerges from Studies on Hysteria is that the 'solution'
which Freud uncovered was frequently a reconstruction based on fragmentary
ideas and images, not (generally) a memory as such. This was the basis of the
procedure which Freud was soon to describe as 'psychoanalysis' (S.E.: III,
151), and which he was to use to reveal the infantile experiences of his
patients.
The infantile seduction theory
Nowhere in Studies on Hysteria, or in any prior publications,
did Freud report that any of his patients had been sexually molested in
infancy. His announcement of his thesis that the symptoms of hysteria and
obsessional neurosis resulted exclusively from repressed memories of sexual
experiences in early childhood was first made in two letters he wrote to his
friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess in October 1895. Specifically, he
conjectured - on theoretical grounds - that hysteria was the consequence of
presexual sexual shock, and obsessional neurosis the consequence of presexual
sexual pleasure (Masson, 1985: 141, 144). On 2 November he triumphantly
reported to Fliess: 'Today I am able to add that one of the cases gave me what
I expected (sexual shock - that is infantile abuse in male hysteria!) and
at the same time a working through of the disputed material strengthened my
confidence in the validity of my psychological constructions' (ibid.: 149).
There were no more such reports to Fliess at that time, but on 1
January 1896, only three months after conceiving the theory, he sent him a
draft of one of the forthcoming seduction theory papers (ibid.: 162-9). Then in
early February he dispatched 'Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses'
(published in a French journal on 30 March 1896 [1896a]) and 'Further Remarks
on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (published on 15 May 1896 [1896b]), in each
of which he claimed that for all his thirteen cases diagnosed as hysteria (two
men and eleven women) he had uncovered repressed memories of sexual traumas in
early childhood. These mostly had occurred below the age of five, and in two
cases 'at one and a half or two years' (S.E.: III, 152, 155, 163, 165). The
assailants were nursemaids, governesses, domestic servants, teachers, and, in
seven of the cases, a boy (generally a brother) only slightly older than the
victim (152, 164). In his six cases of obsessional neurosis (three of whom were
among the thirteen 'hysterics'), the patients had engaged in an active
pleasurable sexual experience around the age of eight or ten, and all of them
had also been subjected to sexual molestation in infancy (155, 168-69).
The third seduction theory paper ('The Aetiology of Hysteria'),
delivered to the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology on 21 April 1896
(1896c), contained a more detailed presentation of Freud's thesis. The number
of cases of hysteria had increased to eighteen (six men and twelve women), and
the culprits now included adult strangers and close relatives in addition to the
categories listed in the previous papers (S.E.:III, 207-8).
Freud alluded to his 'pressure technique' in the 'Further Remarks'
paper (177-8), and elsewhere his words indicate that he was still using the
clinical procedure described in Studies on Hysteria. In the course of
responding to the rhetorical objection that he may been deceived by hysterical
confabulations, he emphasised that '[b]efore they come for analysis the
patients know nothing about these [sexual] scenes. They are indignant as a rule
if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge. Only the strongest
compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of
them.' Not only have they 'no feeling of remembering the scenes' they are
induced to reproduce, he continued, they 'assure me...emphatically of their
unbelief' (204). Similarly, in the 'Heredity' paper he reported:
[T]hese patients never repeat these stories spontaneously, nor do they
ever in the course of a treatment suddenly present the physician with the
complete recollection of a scene of this kind. One only succeeds in awakening
the psychical trace of a precocious sexual event under the most energetic
pressure of the analytic procedure, and against an enormous resistance.
Moreover, the memory must be extracted from them piece by piece... (153).
Although Freud's words elsewhere imply that specific 'scenes' were
'reproduced' by his patients, or even 'recall[ed]...to consciousness' (204),
the passage quoted immediately above suggests that material obtained from the
patients was generally in the form of fragments of ideas or images from which
Freud reconstructed the supposed event. In the introductory section of 'The
Aetiology of Hysteria' Freud compared his procedure to that of a forensic
physician who 'can arrive at the cause of an injury, even if he has to do
without any information from the injured person' (191-2). He explained that
this procedure ('psychoanalysis' [151]) utilized Breuer's discovery that 'the
symptoms of hysteria...are determined by certain experiences of the patient's
which...are being reproduced in his psychical life in the form of mnemic
symbols' (192-3, Freud's emphasis).
The single example of a specific case of hysteria or obsessional
neurosis described in the seduction theory papers illustrates how Freud used
this principle to reconstruct infantile 'scenes' (172-7 n). By analysing the
elements of a male obsessional's sleep-ceremonial Freud inferred that a
servant-girl had sexually abused him in infancy. For instance, the patient's
compulsion 'to kick both legs out a certain number of times' was, in Freud's
words, 'explained' as representing his 'kick[ing] away the person who was lying
on him'. (Nowhere in this account of how Freud psychoanalytically 'traced back'
the symptoms to the inferred sexual scene is there any indication that the
patient reported any recollection of the event.)[3]
Some indication of Freud's approach is also given in a letter to
Fliess, dated 3 January 1897, reporting on a Miss G. de B. who had started
treatment a month before. Freud wrote that his patient had a vaginal discharge
at age 8-10, and some other apparently related symptoms. He also reported: 'A
conspicuous tic; she forms [her lips into] a snout (from sucking). She is
suffering from eczema around her mouth and from lesions that do not heal in the
corners of her mouth. During the night her saliva periodically accumulates,
after which the lesions appear.' From this Freud inferred she had in infancy
been forced to suck on someone's penis. In addition he writes that at age
twelve her speech inhibition first appeared when, 'with a full mouth,
she was fleeing from a woman teacher' (Freud's emphasis). From the fact that
'her father has a similarly explosive speech, as though his mouth were full',
Freud apparently divined that the abuser of the infant Miss G. de B. was her
father. Having arrived at his reconstruction of a sexual scene, he 'thrust the
explanation at her', and reported that 'she was at first won over'. However,
after confronting her father she changed her mind, and Freud responded by
threatening 'to send her away' in order to achieve her compliance (Masson,
1985: 220).[4]
It is of interest to note that Freud's divinations from symptoms had put
him on the trail of another 'sexual scene' in this case, involving G. de B's mother:
'The pain in her leg appears to have come from her mother' (ibid.: 221).
Elsewhere he reported to Fliess other examples of how he inferred sexual scenes
from somatic symptoms:
Hysterical cold shivers = being taken out of a warm bed.
Hysterical headache with sensations of
pressure on the top of the head, temples, and so forth, is characteristic of
scenes where the head is held still for the purpose of actions in the mouth
(ibid.: 230). ...[P]atients who have had something sexual done to them in sleep
have attacks of sleep. (ibid.: 212)
In letters to Fliess after the publication of the seduction theory
papers, Freud reported instances of patients apparently furnishing images or
re-enactments of specific 'sexual scenes' (ibid.: 213, 218, 288), but it is
impossible to ascertain how many patients were induced to provide
'reproductions' of this nature. Borch-Jacobsen (1996) views Freud's pressure
technique as essentially a form of hypnosis, and he cites evidence which
indicates that, in some cases at least, patients were induced to conjure up
hypnagogic images of requisite infantile 'scenes'. In the 'Aetiology' paper
Freud wrote that certain somatic symptoms 'correspond to the sensory content of
the infantile scenes, reproduced in a hallucinatory fashion' (ibid.: 214), but,
as we have seen, elsewhere there are passages which imply that the 'memories'
generally consisted of fragmentary ideas or images from which Freud reconstructed
the fully-fledged sexual scenes; as Toews puts it: 'The seduction scenes were
laboriously constructed from indirect and fragmentary evidence' (1991: 511 n
12). Similarly, Schimek concludes that 'the knowledge of [the] original trauma,
whether an unconscious memory or fantasy, was based on Freud's interpretation
and reconstruction; it was not directly revealed by the patient' (1987:
960).[5] (Cioffi [1972, 1974] had long before reached the same conclusion.)
While the precise nature of Freud's clinical material remains a matter
of conjecture, it is evident that much of it was elicited by means of a highly
directive and coercive technique applied by a physician who had preconceived
ideas of what he would uncover. Given the elastic nature of his analytic
technique of interpretation and reconstruction, one can begin to understand how
it was that Freud was able to claim a remarkable one hundred percent success in
corroborating his theory.[6]
There is still one point remaining to be cleared up. In the traditional
story it had always been self-evident why Freud had posited the seduction
theory: many of his patients were coming to him with reports of childhood
molestations. Since the latter is untrue, an alternative explanation must be
sought. It can be found in the seduction theory papers themselves (S.E.: III,
153-4, 166-7 n), where Freud outlines his idea that when a sexual experience
occurs in early childhood, the precocious excitement produces little or no
effect at the time, but its psychical trace is preserved. When this unconscious
psychical trace is in some way awakened after puberty, the traumatic
memory, though still remaining unconscious, will display a power commensurate
with the patient's now fully developed sexual faculties which manifests itself
in the form of hysterical symptoms. This theory of 'deferred effect' was first
mentioned in the final section of an unpublished manuscript known as 'Project
for a Scientific Psychology' which Freud sent to Fliess on 8 October 1895 along
with the letter in which he first announced the seduction theory (S.E.: I,
356). The 'deferred effect' notion implies an early childhood sexual
trauma theory.
Freud's seduction theory 'confirmations'
During the seduction theory period Freud claimed three cases for which
there was independent confirmation that his patients had experienced sexual
abuse in early childhood. Smith (1991: 13-14) has examined these claims and has
shown they are not substantiated by the evidence adduced by Freud. In the
'Aetiology' paper Freud asserted he had been able to obtain 'an objective
confirmation', ie, 'confirmed by someone else', in two of his cases. However,
in one of these an older brother 'confirmed - not, it is true his earliest
sexual experiences with his sister - but at least scenes of that kind from
later childhood...' (S.E.: III, 206). So in fact the crucial infantile
'scene' was not confirmed in this instance. The other case involved
mutual confirmation from two of his female patients, who supposedly had had
sexual relations with the same man, 'in the course of which certain scenes took
place à trois'. But two patients on whom Freud was using his
questionable reconstructive technique can scarcely be said to have provided
mutual confirmation of supposed infantile sexual experiences. (Freud points to
a similar symptom 'as evidence of what they had experienced in common'.)[7]
There is also a claimed external confirmation in the letter to Fliess
of 3 January 1897. Freud writes of an ex-patient that the latter received
confirmation 'of the reality of the things he remembered' from his 'seducer'
(his nurse, now an old woman). Freud says he learned of this 'from Mrs F. (who
heard it from Professor Sulz [Petz?])' (Masson, 1985: 219). That the news
reached Freud by this circuitous route raises questions about the reliability
of the information. Even if we give credence to this (fourthhand!) claim, we
have no idea what the nurse supposedly confirmed - it might have been no more
than innocent caresses, or that she had given the child an enema. Stronger
evidence than this is required before one can take Freud's 'confirmations' at
their face value.
In a paper addressed to analysts in 1913 Freud referred to 'the
earliest days of analytic technique', and in an allusion to cases in which
knowledge of a forgotten childhood trauma was obtained 'from parents or nurses
or the seducer himself' he reported that his 'telling and describing [the
patient's] repressed trauma to him did not even result in any recollection of
it coming into his mind' (S.E.: XII, 141). However, the only instance he gives
relates to an event experienced by a girl when she was 'approaching puberty';
in other words, it was not an infantile trauma as required by the seduction
theory. As we have seen, the claims of external confirmations Freud made at the
time are doubtful; however, his words in the 1913 report provide further
evidence that it was he himself who told the patients they had
experienced infantile molestations and that the patients did not recall the
supposed traumas.
This 1913 report is instructive in another way. Freud writes that when
he 'repeated her mother's story [of a homosexual experience] to the girl she
reacted with an hysterical attack, and after this she forgot the story once
more. There is no doubt that the patient was expressing a violent resistance
against the knowledge that was being forced upon her.' Freud's words suggest he
is convinced that in such a situation the forgotten scene is on the point of
breaking through to consciousness, and that he takes the girl's 'hysterical
attack' as evidence of this. This may be an indication of what Freud sometimes
had in mind in the seduction theory papers when he wrote of the patients'
'reproducing' sexual scenes or 'recalling [them] to consciousness'. ('While they
are recalling these infantile experiences to consciousness, they suffer under
the most violent sensations...' [S.E.: III, 204].)
Fathers as the culprits
Although it is evident from the above analysis that the traditional story
is erroneous, it is nevertheless necessary to look further into this issue
because there is one document which is invariably cited as evidence that Freud
frequently heard accounts of paternal sexual abuse from his female patients in
the 1890s.
Freud informed Fliess of his loss of faith in the seduction theory in a
letter dated 21 September 1897. There he wrote (among several reasons why he
could no longer maintain his theory): 'Then the surprise that in all cases the father,
not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse' (Masson, 1985: 264;
in the original German: 'Dann die Überraschung, dass in sämtlichen Fällen der Vater
als pervers beschuldigt werden musste, mein eigener nicht ausgeschlossen'
[Masson, 1986: 283]). This has customarily been taken as Freud's reporting his
clinical findings, but there are several grounds for rejecting such an
interpretation of his words.
1. Freud did not write 'had been accused', but 'had to be accused'. It seems
that he was referring to a consequence of his recent speculative
notions, reported in letters to Fliess (Masson, 1985: 212, 228), which had led
him now to conclude that generally fathers had to be the abusers. That in
letters of 11 January and 12 January 1897 he had implicated an uncle (while
explicitly excluding the father) and a nurse in the case of two patients
diagnosed as hysterics contradicts the construal of the sentence in question as
Freud's saying that 'in all cases' fathers had been accused (ibid: 222,
223-4). In fact, in only three of the seven cases reported to Fliess prior to
September 1897 were fathers the supposed culprits (ibid: 213 [correction, 224],
220, 238).
2. That he included his own father in the sentence at issue is a
further indication of its conjectural nature. This suggestion was first made in
a letter of 8 February 1897 on the basis of Freud's belief that several of his
siblings suffered from hysterical symptoms (ibid: 230-31). He exonerated his
father in a letter of 3/4 October 1897 (ibid: 268).[8]
3 He could not have only just experienced 'surprise' in regard to
clinical findings that mostly dated back more than eighteen months (reported in
the 'Aetiology' paper).
4 In May 1897 he reported to Fliess his interpretation of one of
his own dreams as the fulfilment of his 'wish to catch a father as the
originator of neurosis' (ibid.: 249), which is inconsistent with the notion
that he had frequently been doing so previously.
Frequently cited in the context of Freud's alleged concealing that the
putative abusers of his seduction theory patients were generally fathers are
two cases in Studies on Hysteria (1895) involving attempted sexual
assaults on girls (Katharina and Rosalia) where Freud later (1924) added
footnotes acknowledging that he had substituted uncles for fathers for reasons
of 'discretion' (S.E.: II, 134 n, 170 n). However, it should be noted that
these cases are not directly relevant to the infantile seduction theory.
Katharina was not a patient of Freud's but someone with whom he chatted for a
few hours one afternoon while on holiday. The incidents she reported had not
been repressed (ibid.: 129-30, 132), and Katharina was fourteen or older when
the attempted assaults took place. In the case of Rosalia, the incident
described involved her 'uncle' (father) attempting a sexual assault while she
was massaging his back to relieve his rheumatism, a situation which indicates
that the girl was well beyond infancy (ibid.: 172).
Freud's motive for the substitutions may, as he implies, have been less
reprehensible than present-day commentators are prepared to allow, namely to
alter what he regarded as inessential facts to render more difficult any
identification of the victims and culprits. Feminist critics such as Rush (1980:
85) and Herman (1981: 9-10) have cited these cases as evidence that Freud was
anxious to conceal patriarchal abuses, but it is not clear why obnoxious acts
perpetrated by uncles should be regarded as any less a reflection of the abuse
of male power in society than similar acts by fathers.
Myths and misconceptions
Masson's view that 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' was 'the greatest
[paper] Freud ever wrote' (1990[1988]: 87 n) is not shared by other
commentators who have looked at it rather more carefully and found it wanting
in almost every respect, save that of persuasive rhetoric (Thornton, 1983:
233-39; Smith, 1991: 7-15; Israëls and Schatzman, 1993: 23-39; Scharnberg,
1993: 137-219; Wilcocks, 1994: 113-57; Salyard, 1994: 659-66). Salyard, for
instance, found 'it contained errors and inconsistencies, and was sometimes
ambiguous, confusing, and lacking in clarity'.
A close reading of the paper without preconceptions is thus likely to
result in a very different appraisal from Masson's. In addition to the factors
alluded to above, Freud hardly helped his case by recounting clinical
illustrations - only to then confess that they were 'inventions'! (He was
obliged 'to make up fictitious examples', he said, because 'giving an account
of the resolution of a single symptom would...amount to the task of relating an
entire case history' [S.E. III, 196-7]). Several reviewers of Studies on
Hysteria (published the previous year) had already expressed the view that
there was a danger that the technique there described would evoke material of
doubtful authenticity (Kiell, 1988: 68, 74, 82), so it is hardly surprising
that the audience was unimpressed by Freud's lecture.
In a reference to 'the 1896 paper on hysteria' in Against Therapy
Masson writes that 'at this point Freud said the answer had to be seduction,
and by "seduction" he meant something very serious, what we would
today call sexual assault. It corresponded pretty much to incest' (1993[1990]:
107). This passage exemplifies Masson's misconceptions about the seduction
theory. Freud described the supposed premature incidents as 'sexual experiences
affecting the subject's own body', and though he wrote that some of these were
'brutal assaults', elsewhere he stated that 'At the basis of the aetiology of
hysteria we found an event of passive sexuality, an experience submitted to
with a small degree of annoyance or fright' (ibid: 203, 152, 155). His 'deferred
effect' theory merely required some degree of sexual excitation; incest was
only an extreme example of the kind of wide-ranging experience encompassed by
the seduction theory. Moreover, readers of Masson's accounts would not be aware
that Freud insisted the patients had experienced the 'sexual scenes' in the
face of their denials, that he stated that people who remembered
sexual molestation (however serious) in early childhood would not suffer from
hysteria on that account, and that he made the unlikely claim that he had
uncovered sexual molestation in infancy in the case of every single one
of his current patients (including six men) (ibid.: 204, 211, 207-8).
Masson supports his account of the seduction theory episode by
recirculating the myth that Freud was ostracized by his medical colleagues in
the early days of psychoanalysis (1984[1985]: 12). This story, propagated by
Freud and his biographer Ernest Jones, has been shown to be without foundation
(Ellenberger, 1970: 448; Sulloway, 1979: 462-4). There is not the least
evidence that the views of Freud's colleagues played any role in his
abandonment of the seduction theory, nor indeed of the widespread outrage that
Masson claims. In 1897 an assembly of medical professors supported Freud's
nomination for the position of Associate Professor at the
That the 'Aetiology' lecture was received coolly is without doubt true,
but Masson's only other evidence for the supposed fierce antagonism of the
medical profession towards Freud over this issue is the absence of a customary
summary of the lecture and report of any discussion in the minutes of the
meeting at which it was presented, one fiercely critical review of the 'Further
Remarks' paper, and the fact that the seduction theory claims were challenged
in an article published by Löwenfeld in 1899 (Masson, 1984[1985]: 6, 135;
[1992]: xxii). (For Löwenfeld's perceptive criticisms, see Israëls and
Schatzman [1993: 43-4]). The notion that Freud's abandonment of the seduction
theory was in deference to his colleagues (Masson 1984[1985]: xxviii) is
contradicted by the fact that it was not until 1905 that he so much as
intimated publicly his change of mind, and even then he sought to minimize it:
'I cannot admit that in my paper on "The Aetiology of Hysteria" I
exaggerated the frequency or importance of that influence [early childhood
seduction]...' (S.E.: VII: 190).[9]
While undoubtedly some physicians were inclined to dismiss female
patients' reports of sexual assaults as hysterical confabulations, there was
also public acknowledgement of the sexual abuse of children. Krafft-Ebing
wrote, in his widely-read Psychopathia Sexualis (1894 edition): 'Today
rape on children is remarkably frequent. Hofman (
In The Assault on Truth Masson portrays Freud in 1896 as a man
eager to expose the brutal treatment of female children in Viennese society,
and to this end he provides a tendentious account of the period leading up to
the public announcement of the seduction theory (ibid: 79-87). In this section,
a farrago of misconceptions, errors, and speculation masquerading as fact, he
purports to show that Freud started entertaining the seduction theory in 1893,
and thereafter embraced the notion of childhood sexual abuse as a major cause
of psychoneuroses. The truth is that prior to October 1895 it was Freud's view,
expressed both publicly and in letters to Fliess, that psychoneuroses were
caused by repressed memories of sexual experiences of any kind,
including incidents occurring in adulthood. That he only alighted on the
seduction theory in late 1895 is indicated by his words written on 8 October of
that year: 'Just think: among other things I am on the scent of the following
strict precondition for hysteria, namely, that a primary sexual experience
(before puberty), accompanied by revulsion and fright, must have taken place'
(Masson, 1985: 141). Masson highlights a reference to childhood sexual abuse in
a letter written in 1893, but this is merely one of three 'unproven surmises'
relating to cases of 'juvenile neurasthenia without masturbation' on
which Freud is seeking Fliess's opinion (ibid.: 50, Freud's emphasis). In other
words, it is nothing more than a passing conjecture pertaining to a very
specific situation, unrelated to the later seduction theory. Masson's portrait
of Freud as courageously defying his colleagues out of concern for abused
female children (1984[1985]: xxiv-xxv) is belied by a passage at the end of the
'Aetiology' paper in which Freud wrote: 'What is more important to me than the
value you put on my results is the attention you give to the procedure I have employed'
(S.E.: III, 220). What really mattered to Freud was his discovery (as he
thought) of the analytic technique which enabled him to divine the contents of
his patients' unconscious minds and reconstruct their infantile past.[10]
Freud's retrospective reports
To appreciate how most commentators, including Masson, have been misled
by Freud's later reports of the seduction theory episode, the several accounts
he published over the years must be examined. Originally, in the 'Further
Remarks' paper, Freud reported that 'foremost among those guilty' were
nursemaids, governesses, servants and teachers ('with regrettable frequency');
and in seven cases, slightly older boys, mostly brothers (S.E.: III, 164). In
the 'Aetiology' paper Freud added close relatives ('all too often') to the
first group, and also implicated 'adult strangers' (ibid.: 208). However, his
story later changed to accord with his current theory. The seduction theory did
not require specific culprits - hence the wide range of assailants in his
1895-6 reconstructions. By 1897 his cogitations had led to the conjecture that
the culprits in the case of 'hysterics' were generally fathers, and this is
reflected in an abstract of the 'Aetiology' paper: the several categories
specified in that paper were condensed to the claim that 'as a rule' the
abusers were 'to be looked for among the patient's nearest relatives' (ibid.:
254).
Following his abandonment of the seduction theory, in his accounts published
in 1906 and 1914 he paid scant attention to the identities of the supposed
culprits. His primary concern was to report that he had discovered that most of
the 'infantile sexual traumas' which 'analysis had led back to' had been
unconscious phantasies created during the years of puberty to 'cover up'
memories of infantile masturbation (S.E.: VII, 274: XIV, 17-18).[11] (In
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [1905b] he had written of infantile
masturbation that it leaves behind the deepest unconscious impressions in the
memory, determining the development of a healthy person's character and
the symptomatology of those who develop neuroses [S.E.: VII, 189]). It was not
until 1925 that he first stated publicly that in the case of the female patients
'the part of seducer was almost always assigned to their father'. He had
'believed these stories' but was 'at last obliged to recognize' that the scenes
of seduction were 'wishful phantasies' which were, as he was later to realize,
a consequence of the Oedipus complex (S.E.: XX, 33-4).[12] (At the time he had
just begun applying his Oedipal theory to female development [S.E.: XIX,
177-9]). In 1933 he reiterated that during the seduction theory period 'almost
all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father', and
it is this final version of the story which acquired the status of historical
fact for most of this century (S.E.: XXII, 120). (A little earlier he had
reported for the first time that 'girls regularly [sic] accuse their mother
of seducing them', in accord with his belated "discovery" that infant
girls' first libidinal attachment is to their mother [S.E.: XXI, 238]).
Freud's 1906 account marks the first stage in his self-serving
misrepresentation of the seduction theory episode. He wrote that he 'was at
that period [1895-96] unable to distinguish with certainty between
falsifications made by hysterics in their memories of childhood and traces of
real events' (ibid.: 274). His choice of words serves both to obscure the fact
that the putative memories were unconscious and had been reconstructed by means
of his psychoanalytic technique, and to extenuate his error by implying that
the patients were responsible for the supposed false 'memories'.[13]
Freud implicitly revealed that there was something amiss with the
received story when his 1925 account he wrote that the childhood seduction
scenes (which 'I had arrived at...by a technical method which I considered
correct') were reproduced 'under the influence of the technical procedure
which I used at that time' (emphasis added). This acknowledgement no doubt
reflects the fact that he had recently edited the seduction theory papers in
preparation for their reprinting in 1924. Equally noteworthy is that according
to both his 1925 and his 1933 accounts, he was the recipient of reports of
paternal seductions from almost all his female patients only during the period
when he maintained the seduction theory.
Perhaps because he had recently reread the seduction theory papers,
Freud's 1925 account is particularly revealing. He wrote that he was obliged to
recognize that the 'scenes of seduction' were 'only phantasies which my
patients had made up or which I had perhaps forced on them' (S.E.: XX,
34, emphasis added). He went on to say: 'I do not believe even now that I
forced the seduction phantasies on my patients, that I "suggested"
them', but remarkably, given the 'overwhelming importance' he accords his
discovery of the supposed infantile phantasies (ibid.: 34), he gives no reason
why he rejects this possibility. One is left wondering about the significance
of 'even now' in this sentence. Could this be an inadvertent intimation that
even now that he had been reminded of what he wrote at the time, which contains
indications that he had indeed forced the 'scenes' on his patients, he would
not (one might say could not) allow himself to entertain the possibility?[14]
It is evident from the above that the account taken as historical fact
by Masson was but the final stage of a story whose ever-changing nature served
to obscure the truth about what happened between Freud and his patients in
1895-7.
Conclusions
Jeffrey Masson has produced an erroneous account of the seduction
theory episode which, as Rycroft writes, demonstrates his 'incapacity to
distinguish between facts, inferences, and speculations' (1991[1984]: 75). His
errors result from his failure to grasp the nature of the clinical procedure
Freud was using, his uncritical presumption that the latter's clinical claims
were valid, and his acceptance of Freud's historical accounts in spite of the
scholarly research which has shown them to be unreliable. This will, of course,
bring little comfort to his psychoanalytic critics, since it is evident that
the theory of infantile seduction phantasies which superseded the seduction
theory was based on the same unsound clinical claims. Masson (along with
feminists such as Rush and Herman) are absolutely right to censure the
psychoanalytic community for encouraging analytically-oriented therapists to
construe female patients' reports of childhood sexual abuse as fantasies. This
unfortunate tendency was actually based on a misconception. In Freud's theory
the fantasies (phantasies) in question are unconscious (S.E. VII,
274-75) and thus have to be analytically uncovered by the therapist; reports of
childhood sexual abuse that had always been remembered do not fall into this
category. Psychoanalysts, like almost everyone else, were deceived by Freud's
misleading retrospective accounts of the episode.
The dawning realization that he could not continue to maintain the
thesis of an exclusive sexual molestation aetiology should have caused Freud to
reflect on whether his newly developed psychoanalytic technique for accessing
unconscious memories was flawed. Instead he insisted his findings were
essentially correct but that what he had supposedly uncovered (the preconceived
infantile 'sexual scenes' he had foisted on his patients) were generally
unconscious phantasies of seduction. His later accounts of the episode
served to conceal that his clinical findings reported in 1896 were an artefact
of his coercive application of the analytic technique of reconstruction. In the
words of Cioffi: 'Freud could not bring himself to recognize the reasoning by which
he had persuaded himself of the authenticity of the seductions, because it was
the same sort of reasoning which, for the rest of his career, he was to employ
in his reconstruction of infantile fantasy life and of the content of the
unconscious in general' (1974: 173-4).
One final point: it must be emphasized that it is not being argued that
none of Freud's patients in the relevant period had been sexually abused
in childhood. Apart from the two cases of attempted sexual assault reported in Studies
on Hysteria, there are unambiguous indications that a female patient who
began treatment in 1897 was the victim of repeated post-infantile sexual abuse
by her father - though it should be noted that she told Freud at the very start
of the treatment, and there was no suggestion that she had repressed the memory
of her experiences (Masson, 1985: 238). But the story that most of Freud's
female patients in the seduction theory period told him they had been sexually
abused in early childhood, the cornerstone of Masson's account of the episode,
is contradicted by the contemporary documentary evidence.[15]
NOTES
1 The word Phantasie was almost invariably used by Freud to
denote an inferred unconscious idea or image which he had analytically
reconstructed. Its frequent translation as 'fantasy' (rather than 'phantasy' as
in the Standard Edition) has exacerbated the tendency to misconstrue the
ideas or images in question as conscious experiences of Freud's patients
(Esterson, 1993: 166-8). The significance of this will become apparent in the
course of this article.
2 Salyard was apparently unaware that this had already ceased to
be true when she published her article. See Cioffi (1972, 1974), Macmillan
(1977, 1991), Steele (1982), Thornton (1983), Schimek (1987), Smith (1991),
Esterson (1993), Israëls and Schatzman (1993), Scharnberg (1993), and Powell
and Boer (1994), all of whom have disputed Freud's retrospective accounts of
the episode.
3 Several examples of the analytic technique of reconstruction, ie,
the inferring of supposedly repressed traumatic 'scenes' or unconscious
phantasies from patients' symptoms and associations, can be found in the 'Dora'
case history, written in 1901 (S.E.: VII, 46-8, 79-80, 83). In his introductory
remarks Freud explicitly relates his methodology to that employed in 1895-6
(ibid.: 7).
4 Lest anyone should doubt that Freud's coercive treatment of
Miss G. de B. typified his approach at that time, here is what he wrote in a
paper published in 1898: 'Having diagnosed a case of neurasthenic neurosis with
certainty...we are in a position to translate the symptomatology into
aetiology; and we may then boldly demand confirmation of our suspicions from
the patient. We must not be led astray by initial denials. If we keep firmly to
what we have inferred we shall in the end conquer every resistance by
emphasising the unshakeable nature of our convictions' (S.E.: III, 269).
5 In the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams,
completed in 1899, Freud wrote in relation to a dream from 1895: 'It was my
view at that time...that my task was fulfilled when I had informed a
patient of the hidden meaning of his symptoms' (S.E.: IV, 108, emphasis added).
Again, in 1908 Freud wrote in relation to 'the hysteric's unconscious phantasies':
'The technique of psychoanalysis enables us in the first place to infer from
the symptoms what those unconscious phantasies are and then to make them
conscious to the patient' (S.E., IX: 162).
6 Freud claimed that in the case of his six obsessional patients
he had uncovered an active (pleasurable) sexual experience at age eight
or ten, in line with the speculative differential aetiology theory he had
announced to Fliess in October 1895 (see above). This necessitated the
occurrence of a corresponding passive experience in infancy (to account
for the perverse activities of prepubertal boys [S.E.: III, 155]) and, sure
enough, he reported that 'analysis confirms this suspicion' - these patients
had all experienced the two types of sexual experiences at the appropriate ages
(ibid.: 155-6, 168-9)). However, following his abandonment of the seduction
theory he never again referred to these claimed corroborations of his
differential aetiology theory, and in 1906 he reported that after relinquishing
the seduction theory he had been 'obliged to abandon this [differential
aetiology] view entirely' (S.E.: VII, 275). It seems that, with the aid of his
analytic technique, Freud had little problem in corroborating his current
theory - and in jettisoning the corroborations when the theory changed.
7 Scharnberg (1993: 156) has directed attention to an odd
inconsistency. Freud reported that 'out of eighteen cases, I have been able to
obtain an objective confirmation of this sort in two'. Since in one of the two
instances Freud claimed mutual confirmation by two of his patients, he should
have stated he had confirmed three out of eighteen cases.
8 His assertion in the same letter that in his case 'the prime
originator' (ibid: 268) was his nursemaid was derived from dream analysis
(Masson, 1985: 269).
9 The explanation for Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory
is a matter of much debate (see Israëls and Schatzman, 1993: 47-58; Kupfersmid,
1993; Macmillan, 1997[1991]: 636-40). In the 21 September 1897 letter to
Fliess, he gave several motives for his loss of faith; however, in his
published accounts (1906, 1914, 1925b) he provided rather different reasons
which are neither consistent nor convincing (S.E.: VII, 274, 276; XIV, 17; XX,
34; Cioffi, 1988: 62-4; Israëls and Schatzman, 1993: 39-47). For instance, in
his 1914 account he claimed its 'contradiction in definitely ascertainable
circumstances'. As Cioffi has pointed out (1984: 743), a plausible scenario for
such a contradiction is difficult to envisage: how could Freud have ascertained
that a patient had not been sexually molested in infancy? Moreover, had there
been any substance to this claim, Freud could scarcely have failed to mention
it in his 1906 account (and in his letters to Fliess at the time).
10 In 1901 Fliess disparaged Freud's analytic technique as that
of 'the reader of thoughts [who] merely reads his own thoughts into other
people' (Masson, 1985: 447).
11 To take this explanation seriously one would have to accept
that for a girl, the memory of having masturbated in infancy was more
distressing than the belief that she had been sexually abused. In 1905-6 Freud
was grappling with the problem of how he could explain away the discarded
claims which he had announced so confidently in 1896, and his story was at a
transitional stage. While claiming that in 1895-6 his material 'happened by
chance to include a disproportionately large number of cases in which sexual
seduction by an adult or by older children played the chief part in the history
of the patient's childhood', he also asserted unspecifically that he had
'learnt to explain a number of phantasies of seduction as attempts at fending
off memories of the subject's own sexual activity (infantile
masturbation)'. By the time he gave his next account, the 'large number of
cases' had dwindled considerably, and what he had 'learnt to explain' had
become a 'discovery' (S.E.: XIV, 17-18), paving the way for his final version.
12 The plausibility of the belated Oedipal phantasies explanation
of the seduction theory episode is undermined by the fact that Freud never once
mentioned corresponding reports of maternal seduction phantasies by male
patients arising from their infantile incestuous desires. Though his
female patients were more numerous and supposedly more forthcoming in providing
evidence of Oedipal phantasies, Freud stated in 1935 that 'The information
about infantile sexuality was obtained from the study of men and the theory
deduced from it was concerned with male children' (S.E.: XX, 36 n). It is not
immediately apparent why the analytic technique for accessing the unconscious
should have been less successful in the case of women patients, but it seems
that once he put his mind to it (starting in 1925 [S.E.: XIX, 241-258]) he was
able to plumb the depths of the female unconscious, and by 1931 he had provided
a full description of their psychosexual development (S.E.: XXI, 221-43). (An
account of how 'analysis' enabled him to accomplish this can be found in
[Esterson, 1993: 140-9].)
13 The 1906 account contains another example of how Freud's story
was in the process of transmuting. Whereas in Three Essays (1905b) he
had stated that he 'cannot admit' that he had exaggerated the frequency of
'seduction' in early childhood (S.E.: VII, 190), he now wrote that he had
'over-estimated the frequency of such events' (ibid.: 274). As a further
illustration of the unreliability of Freud's retrospective reports, in 1905 he
wrote in the context of his explaining his abandonment of the seduction theory
that he 'did not then [in 1896] know that persons who remain normal may have
had the same [seduction] experiences in their childhood' (S.E.: VII, 190).
Though he claimed that 'further information' which had 'now become available'
had led to this 'unexpected finding' (ibid.: 276), in the 'Aetiology' paper he
had explicitly acknowledged 'the observed fact that many people who remember
such [seduction] scenes...have not become hysterics' (S.E.: III, 209,
Freud's emphasis). In fact he is being doubly disingenuous here, because he
fails to allude to the important point that these memories of 'normal' people
were conscious, and that in 1896 he had discounted such cases because
their memories were not repressed (ibid.: 211).
14 In this same passage Freud disingenuously portrays his earlier
self as a naive physician who had been deceived by his patients' reports: 'If
the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot
altogether blame him.' One would not have guessed from this that in 1896 he had
defended his claims against the potential objection that he had been deceived
by hysterical confabulations as follows: 'I should accuse myself of blameworthy
credulity if I did not possess more conclusive evidence [than statements of
patients]' (S.E.: III, 153).
15 Space considerations have necessitated the omission of an
examination of Masson's misleading account of the prehistory of the seduction
theory, his claim that the Wolf Man was sexually abused in infancy by a member
of his family, and his uncritical presentations of the clinical claims of
Sándor Ferenczi and Robert Fliess. Readers interested in a critique of these
sections of The Assault on Truth should visit the following website: http://human-nature.com/esterson/addendum.html
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