ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud retracted his seduction hypothesis as early as 1897, in a letter to Fliess dated 21 September, although, as Frampton observes, public denouncement did not occur until 1906. The retraction is associated with a shift in Freud's thinking that was to underlie the later developments in Freud's psychoanalytic theory. The nature of unpleasure motivating repression can be viewed within the context of primary and secondary repression, a distinction that first appears in a letter from Freud to Ferenczi dated 6 December 1910 and formerly published in the Schreber case study. Infantile amnesia is the pervasive phenomenon where all knowledge before the age of four or five cannot be remembered, and although the point is not a major one in Freud's thinking. The chapter discusses the next stage in Freud's thinking related to the theory of id, ego, and superego before discussing some of the intricacies in Freud's thinking.
