ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Freud’s three seduction theory papers, written in 1896. In a lecture to the Society of Psychiatry in Vienna on 21 April 1896, Freud presents his theory of sexual molestation in childhood as the specific aetiology of hysteria. He said, ‘I believe this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili in neuropathology’. But he told Fliess that his lecture was given ‘an icy reception’ after he had demonstrated the solution to a thousand-year-old problem.
Freud is comparing his theory of hysteria to the medieval theory of the possession of witches. Freud says in his lecture that hysteria is always a deferred consequence of sexual abuse before puberty, usually by adults. ‘The scenes must be present as unconscious memories’ in order to create hysterical symptoms. Freud is also claiming that ‘in hysterical people a present-day precipitating cause activates the memory-trace of the childhood sexual trauma’.
Freud claims that the only way these unconscious memories of childhood sexual traumas can be extracted is through ‘a new method of psychoanalysis’, in which he uses his pressure technique. Freud claims this is the only way of making the unconscious conscious. As late as 1925, Freud denies that his procedure is inquisitorial. He says, ‘I do not believe even now that I forced the seduction-phantasies on my patients, that I suggested them’.
