ABSTRACT
Freud had not written any case history to back up his seduction theory. The reasons Freud gave in his 1905 and 1906 papers were not his real reasons for abandoning his theory. He wrote privately to Fliess on 21 September 1897, in which he gave the real reasons: he didn’t have the evidence to prove his theory; he hadn’t finished a single case that could prove his theory.
Freud retracted his theory that all cases of hysteria were caused by sexual abuse in childhood but he never withdrew his belief that some cases were caused by childhood sexual abuse. Freud is not blaming his inquisitorial procedure of squeezing out of his patients the stories of seduction that he wanted to hear in order to prove his theory. Instead, he blames ‘falsifications made by hysterics in their memories’.
Freud wrote on 1925 that the scenes of seduction were ‘only phantasies’ that he ‘perhaps’ forced on them. Instead, he claimed that he had stumbled on the Oedipus complex, which he ‘did not recognise in the guise of phantasy’.
