ABSTRACT
In Studies on Hysteria, Sigmund Freud attributed to the symptoms of his patients a meaning which traced them to sexual traumas in their family life, which occurred around puberty. He postulated that not only hysteria, but also other neuroses and even psychoses originated in early sexual assaults, which occured before the age of four and in which children were molested by adults or by elder siblings who had themselves been molested at an even earlier stage. Freud's conception of the trauma had as much to do with complexities of authority and dependence as with sex and violence. Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory allowed him to concentrate on what were to become the core issues of psychoanalysis, such as infantile sexuality, libidinal drives and sexual fantasies. As he put it in his account of the history of the psychoanalytic movement: 'from behind the phantasies, the whole range of a child's sexual life came to light'.
