[  Home | Synopsis | Addendum | Burying  Freud ]

Jeffrey Masson and

Freud's seduction
theory: a new fable
based on old myths

Synopsis

by Allen Esterson

See History of the Human Sciences, volume 11, no. 1,

February 1998, pp.1-21

Please note that this is a synopsis of the above

article and cannot cover
every detail. For the the full argument readers
should consult the original
article in History of the Human Sciences

Introduction

One of the most enduring myths of psychoanalytic

history is that Freud proposed his seduction theory as a
result of hearing frequent reports from his female
patients that they had been sexually abused in
childhood. A second myth is that in the early days of
psychoanalysis, Freud's medical colleagues took such
exception to his theories of infantile sexuality that they
subjected him to professional ostracism. Jeffrey Masson
combined these two myths to produce a compelling and
influential account of the seduction theory episode.
However, an examination of the contemporary documents
indicates that Freud's clinical findings reported in the
seduction theory papers were spurious, that he was right
to abandon the seduction theory, and that Masson's
version of events is erroneous.

In 1896 Freud published three papers in which he claimed

that obsessional neurosis and hysteria (a condition in
which patients exhibit somatic symptoms having no
apparent organic origin) were caused exclusively by
repressed memories of sexual molestations in early
childhood. According to the traditional story, he
abandoned this 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.
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.

The Pressure Technique

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. 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 (S.E.: II, 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).

The Infantile Seduction Theory

Freud first announced his thesis that the symptoms of

hysteria and obsessional neurosis resulted exclusively
from repressed memories of sexual experiences in early
childhood in two letters he wrote to his friend and
confidant Wilhelm Fliess in October 1895. 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). In early February he
completed 'Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses'
(published in a French journal) and 'Further Remarks on
the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence', in each of which he
claimed that for all his thirteen cases diagnosed as
hysteria he had uncovered repressed memories of sexual
traumas in early childhood. The assailants were
nursemaids, governesses, domestic servants, teachers,
and brothers slightly older than the victim (S.E: III, 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, 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's words in these papers indicate that the patients

did not come to him with reports of sexual abuse in early
childhood: 'Before 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, 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).

In the 'Aetiology' paper Freud wrote that certain

somatic symptoms 'correspond to the sensory content of
the infantile scenes, reproduced in a hallucinatory
fashion' (214), but 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. In the
words of Schimek: '[T]he 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), a
conclusion also reached by Cioffi (1974) in the early
1970s. 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'.

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 seduction theory papers, Freud reported a variety
of assailants (S.E.: III, 164, 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 culprits 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 1897 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).1 (This relates to notions to
be found in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
[1905, 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'. (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).
Conclusions

Jeffrey Masson has produced an erroneous account of

the seduction theory episode which results 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. The
traditional story that most of Freud's female patients in
the seduction theory period reported that they had been
sexually abused by their fathers in early childhood, the
cornerstone of Masson's account of the episode, is false.
This will 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.2

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).

2 Freud's 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
(1974: 173-4): '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.'

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1996) "Neurotica: Freud and the

Seduction Theory", October 76 October Magazine Ltd.
and MIT, Spring 1996: 15-43.

Cioffi, F. (1974). 'Was Freud a Liar?', The Listener, 91:

172-4; reprinted (1975) Journal of Orthomolecular
Psychiatry, 5: 275-80.

Esterson, A. (1993) Seductive Mirage: An Exploration

of the Work of Sigmund Freud. Chicago and La Salle,
IL: Open Court.
Freud, S. (1953-74) The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.
and trans. by J. Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press
and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.

Israëls, H. and Schatzman, M. (1993) 'The Seduction

Theory', History of Psychiatry, iv: 23- 59.

Masson, J. M. (1984) The Assault on Truth: Freud's

Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; new edn (1985)
Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin Books.

-----. (editor) (1985) The Complete Letters of Sigmund

Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904, ed. and trans. J.
M. Masson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schimek, J. G. (1987) 'Fact and Fantasy in the Seduction

Theory: a Historical Review', Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, xxxv: 937-65.

mailto:AllenEsterson@compuserve.com,Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.comIf
you wish
to submit your contribution to this WWW site for
the Seduction Theory Debate please write to
Allen Esterson

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=darwinanddarwini&path=tg/browse/­
 /909656/
http://member.linkexchange.com/cgi­bin/fc/fastcounter­
 login?477966 http://v1.nedstatbasic.net/stats?ABpTEAGl1Zt107E0m+78yrkeoVdQ
   
human-nature.com © Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last
updated: 24 June, 1999 08:53 AM

US -
Search:

Keywords:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect­home/darwinanddarwini
UK -
Search:

Keywords:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect­home/humannaturecom | Human
Nature | The Human Nature Daily Review | Psychiatry
Research Online |