ABSTRACT

Before I take up the psychoanalytic situation, I will discuss more specifically a very general issue in psychic functioning, namely, the relationship between internal and external factors.

What is probably the single most fateful event in the history of psychoanalysis is Freud's discovery that he had been mistaken in believing that most of the tales of childhood sexual seduction that his patients told him in the 1890s had actually taken place. When his earlier conclusion fell of its own improbable weight, he was crestfallen. But he was able to snatch an important victory from the jaws of defeat. The tales, he concluded, were for the most part fantasies, not descriptions of external events that had actually taken place. He further concluded that such fantasies were the expression of universally present, innate, instinctual drives.