Sigmund Freud, founder of Psychoanalysis.
Freud's seduction theory (German: Verführungstheorie) was a hypothesis posited in the mid-1890s by Sigmund Freud that he believed provided the solution to the problem of the origins of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. According to the theory, a repressed memory of an early childhood sexual abuse
or molestation experience was the essential precondition for hysterical
or obsessional symptoms, with the addition of an active sexual
experience up to the age of eight for the latter.
In the traditional account of development of seduction theory,
Freud initially thought that his patients were relating more or less
factual stories of sexual mistreatment, and that the sexual abuse was responsible for many of his patients' neuroses and other mental health problems. Within a few years Freud abandoned his theory, concluding that the memories of sexual abuse were in fact imaginary fantasies.
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.
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.
These papers indicate that the patients did not relate stories of
having been sexually abused in early childhood; rather, Freud used the
analytic interpretation of symptoms and patients' associations, and the
exerting of pressure on the patient, in an attempt to induce the
"reproduction" of the deeply repressed memories he posited.
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.
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.
Freud’s seduction theory
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".
Using a sample of 18 patients—male and female—from his practice, he
concluded that all of them had been the victims of sexual assaults by
various caretakers. The cause of the patient's distress lay in a trauma
inflicted by an actor in the child's social environment. The source of
internal psychic pain lay in an act inflicted upon the child from
outside. This led to his well-known ‘seduction theory’.
The medical journals of that time did not report Freud's lecture. In the Wiener klinische Wochenschrift,
published weekly in Vienna, on May 14, 1896, three papers were reported
from the April 21 meeting (p. 420). Two of the papers were reported in
the usual manner. Invariably, the practice was to give the title of a
paper, a brief summary of its contents, and an account of the ensuing
discussion. But in the citation of the last paper, there was a break
with tradition. The report reads as follows: Docent Sigm. Freud: Über die Ätiologie der Hysterie (Sigmund Freud, lecturer: On the Aetiology of Hysteria.) There was no summary and no discussion. Freud published it a few weeks later in the Wiener klinische Rundschau.
On the other hand, Freud had no trouble publishing three papers
on the subject in a matter of months. Doubt has been cast on the notion
that the occurrence of child sexual abuse was not acknowledged by most
of Freud's colleagues. 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.
Freud's seduction theory emphasizes the causative impact of nurture:
the shaping of the mind by experience. This theory held that hysteria
and obsessional neurosis are caused by repressed memories of infantile
sexual abuse. Infantile sexual abuse, the root of all neurosis, is premature introduction of sexuality into the experience of the child. Trauma
creates affects and thoughts that simply cannot be integrated. The
adult who had a normal, non traumatic childhood is able to contain and
assimilate sexual feelings into a continuous sense of self. Freud
proposed that adults who experienced sexual abuse as a child suffer from
unconscious
memories and feelings incompatible with the central mass of thoughts
and feelings that constitute his or her experience. Psychic disorders
are a direct consequence of experiences that cannot be assimilated.
Unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse was a necessary
condition for the development of certain disorders, hysteria in
particular. But another condition had to be met: There had to be an
unconscious memory of the abuse.
Freud’s reported evidence for the seduction theory
Freud
had a lot of data as evidence for the seduction theory, but rather than
presenting the actual data on which he based his conclusions (his
clinical cases and what he had learned from them) or the methods he used
to acquire the data (his psychoanalytic technique), he instead
addressed only the evidence that the data he reportedly acquired were
accurate (that he had discovered genuine abuse). He thought that the
community could not yet handle the clinical case stories about sexual
abuse. He did not want to present these stories before the seduction
theory had become more accepted.
Freud made several arguments to support the position that the memories
he had uncovered were genuine. One of them was, according to Freud, that
the patients were not simply remembering the events as they would
normally forgotten material; rather they were essentially reliving the
events, with all the accompanying painful sensory experiences.
On two occasions Freud wrote that he would be presenting the clinical evidence for his claims, but he never did so, which some critics have contended means that they have had to be taken largely on trust.
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,
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.
Abandonment of ‘seduction theory’
Freud
did not publish the reasons that led to his abandoning the seduction
theory in 1897–1898. For these we have to turn to a letter he wrote to
his confidant Wilhelm Fliess dated 21 September 1897.
- First, he referred to his inability to “bring a single analysis to a real conclusion” and "the absence of complete successes" on which he had counted.
- Second, he wrote of his “surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse" if he were to be able to maintain the theory; and the "realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria… whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable."
- Third, Freud referred to indications that, he argued, the unconscious is unable to distinguish fact from fiction. In the unconscious there is no sign of reality, so one cannot differentiate between the truth and the fiction invested with feeling.
- Fourth, Freud wrote of his belief that in deep-reaching psychosis, unconscious memories do break through to the conscious, "so the secret of childhood experiences is not disclosed even in the most confused delirium." (In the same letter Freud wrote that his loss of faith in his theory would remain known only to himself and Fliess, and in fact he did not make known his abandonment of the theory publicly until 1906.)
The collapse of the seduction theory led in 1897 to the emergence of Freud's new theory of infantile sexuality.
The impulses, fantasies and conflicts that Freud claimed to have
uncovered beneath the neurotic symptoms of his patients derived not from
external contamination, he now believed, but from the mind of the child
itself.
There were some serious negative consequences of this shift. The
most obvious negative consequence was that a limited interpretation of
Freud's theory of infantile sexuality would cause some therapists and
others to deny reported sexual abuse as fantasy; a situation that has
given rise to much criticism (e.g. The Freudian Coverup by social worker Florence Rush). 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.
An alternative view involves the recognition that the notion of
unconscious mental processes was commonplace before Freud started
writing on the subject.
Moreover, the skepticism of almost all non-Freudian psychiatrists and
psychologists towards Freud's psychosexual stages of childhood is that
it is not consistent with much of current informed opinion.
