ABSTRACT
When Sigmund Freud announced his seduction or repressed abuse theory of hysteria in April 1896, it was denounced by an expert in sexual perversions, Richard Krafft-Ebing, as a scientific fairy tale. While hysteria was due to sexual abuse of the patient when they were eighteen months to four years old, obsessional neurosis was due to sexual abuse of the patient when they were four to eight years old, and paranoia was due to sexual abuse of the patient when they were eight to fourteen years old. Freud speculated that his patients’ repressed memories of having been sexually abused might have been the product of wishful fantasy resulting from things they had heard ‘at an early age’. Freud argued that memories of early childhood must be the product of fantasy since researchers had shown that it is only from the age of five or six that we can recall memories as ‘a connected chain of events’.
