ABSTRACT
This chapter considers why Freud shifted his focus from actual trauma to biology and heredity, and why Ferenczi, having shared with Freud a profound passion for the "archaic", shifted the focus back to actual trauma and shock. Freud's decision to abandon his initial theory of hysteria and to adopt a drive based model of the human psyche remains one of the most debated and controversial topics in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud's final account of the decision to discard his seduction theory thus signaled back to the disappointment he presumably experienced during the last phase of Emma's analysis in 1897. The sexual life of the child became a social problem and a medical concern around the middle of the 19th century. Freud's position was connected to a larger ideological context that viewed childhood as a stage of transition between primitivism and civilization.
