The Freudian Cover-up is a theory introduced by social worker Florence Rush in 1971, which asserts that Sigmund Freud intentionally ignored evidence that his patients were victims of sexual abuse.
This became the frame for the seduction theory, in which he pointed to a direct connection between sexual abuse in childhood and adult hysteria.
According to Florence Rush, author of The Freudian Cover-up, this repeated and persistent incrimination of fathers by his patients made him uneasy, and led him to abandon the seduction theory.
The Freudian Cover-up exposed Freud’s theory, the refusal to name the offender, but furthermore, one man's attempt to hide illegal or immoral sex practices.
Freud, who regarded the incest taboo as vital to the advance of civilization, appeared to demand only that forbidden sex be practiced with tact and discretion so that the surface of Victorian respectability was in no way disturbed.
[8] The very essence of the seduction theory entailed that only unconscious memories of early childhood sexual abuse could result in hysterical or obsessional symptoms, which is inconsistent with the notion of patients coming to him with reports of childhood sexual abuse; on Freud's theory the putative memories were deeply repressed and not accessible to consciousness in normal circumstances.