ABSTRACT
The critical clinical issue that Freud addressed in his essay was not trauma, but hysteria. Patients with hysteria were for the most part women, though Freud argued, against considerable resistance from his peers, for the existence of male hysteria, with a range of medical, neurological, and psychiatric symptoms that were, at the time, felt to be resistant to medicine’s efforts at both understanding them and treating them. Freud, as is well known, then went ahead and abandoned this thesis—which is commonly known as the Seduction Theory, and replaced it with a range of other explanations. The most common version of the story is that Freud dropped the Seduction Theory and replaced it with the Oedipus complex. Psychoanalysts exerted a strong presence in directing psychological treatments—within the military psychiatry departments—of traumatic neurosis. Freud is now in a position to revisit the traumatic dreams, whose function he now reformulates as that of stimulus binding.
