Freud's seduction theory
[4] An alternative account that has come to the fore in recent Freudian scholarship emphasizes that the theory, as posited by Freud, was that hysteria and obsessional neurosis result from unconscious memories of sexual abuse in infancy.
[5] In the three seduction theory papers published in 1896, Freud stated that with all his current patients he had been able to uncover such abuse, mostly below the age of four.
[7] Though he reported he had succeeded in achieving this aim, he also acknowledged that the patients generally remained unconvinced that what they had experienced indicated that they had actually been sexually abused in infancy.
[8] Freud's reports of the seduction theory episode went through a series of changes over the years, culminating in the traditional story based on his last account, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
[9] On the evening of April 21, 1896, Sigmund Freud presented a paper before his colleagues at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, entitled "The Aetiology of Hysteria".
It has been pointed out that they were skeptical about Freud's claims of one hundred percent confirmation of his theory, and would have been aware of criticisms that his suggestive clinical procedures were liable to produce findings of doubtful validity.
[18] On two occasions Freud wrote that he would be presenting the clinical evidence for his claims,[19] but he never did so,[20] which some critics have contended means that they have had to be taken largely on trust.
[21] Freud's clinical methodology at the time, involving the symbolic interpretation of symptoms, the use of suggestion and the exerting of pressure to induce his patients to "reproduce" the deeply repressed memories he posited,[22] has led several Freud scholars and historians of psychology to cast doubt on the validity of his findings, whether of actual infantile abuse, or, as he later decided, unconscious fantasies.
The impulses, fantasies and conflicts that Freud claimed to have uncovered beneath the neurotic symptoms of his patients derived not from only external contamination, but also from the mind of the child itself.
However, without the rejection of the seduction theory, concepts such as the unconscious, repressions, the repetition compulsion, transference and resistance, and the unfolding psychosexual stages of childhood would never have been added to human knowledge.
[27] In 1998, a century after Freud abandoned the Seduction Theory, a group of analysts and psychologists, including Stephen Mitchell, George Makari, Leonard Shengold, Jacob Arlow, and Anna Ornstein, met at Mount Sinai Hospital to reconsider the Seduction Theory, during which they discussed what any therapist can really know about their patients' true histories and whether that lack of certainty about the truth matters for treatment.
