Zv. Lothane - On The History of Seduction Theory

FREUD’S ALLEGED REPUDIATION
OF THE SEDUCTION THEORY REVISITED:

FACTS AND FALLACIES
Zvi Lothane
Over the decades the official story, nay, the shibboleth of ortho-
dox psychoanalysis (as represented, for example, by Anna Freud,
Ernest Jones, James Strachey, and Kurt Eissler), has been that
Freud retracted the false seduction theory of the neuroses in
favor of the true theory, infantile sexuality and the Oedipus com-
plex. This change of causal theory, analysts believed, stemmed
from clinical experience and was an act of intellectual courage.
Freud’s own account of his revelation (Freud, 1896a), recanta-
tion (letter to Fliess of September 1897), and rehabilitation of
the seduction theory stands in stark contrast to the official story.
In 1981 Jeffrey Masson transformed the controversy into a
cause célèbre by claiming, upon reading letters from Freud to
Fliess (Freud, 1887–1904), previously expurgated by Anna Freud
from their first publication in 1950, that Freud abjured the se-
duction theory out of cowardice and dishonesty. These views
were sensationalized by reporters Ralph Blumenthal in 1981 and
Janet Malcolm in 1983 (Malcolm, 1984), in The New York Times
and The New Yorker magazine, respectively, to climax in 1984 in
the no less sensational best-seller by Masson (1984a) The Assault
on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. But even be-
fore the book appeared, Malcolm’s portrait of Masson in The
New Yorker made him look like a mix of modern-day Rasputin
with women and a seductive manipulator of his elders—in the
words of psychiatrist Robert Coles writing in The Boston Globe,
“a grandiose egotist—mean-spirited, self-serving, full of bragga-
docio, impossibly arrogant and, in the end, a self-destructive fool
. . . his own words reveal this psychological profile” (quoted in
Psychoanalytic Review, 88(5), October 2001  2001 N.P.A.P.
674 ZVI LOTHANE
Masson, 1984c), surely an exaggeration. The ensuing media cir-

cus and the libel suit Masson brought and lost against Janet Mal-
colm, in reality one of the architects of his fame, is now history.
In 1983 I was also interviewed by Janet Malcolm and sent
her the draft of the paper (Lothane, 1983b) in which I argued
that Freud never abandoned this theory, but was not mentioned
in her reportage in The New Yorker. Continuing this argument in
my review of The Assault on Truth (1987a), I showed that the
apostles and the apostate were both wrong: Freud indeed seemed
to abjure the seduction theory but in fact never did. Moreover,
it struck me as amazing that the selfsame claim, that Freud repu-
diated his seduction theory, could be so differently viewed, turn-
ing into such a deadly conflict between the critic and the estab-
lishment. This modern tragedy smacked of Antigone and King
Lear, while Masson’s subsequent fall from grace, that left him
“stripped of all rank, like a disgraced soldier” (Masson, 1990,
p. 204), echoed the fall of Dreyfus. How did such an amazing
transmogrification come about?
I became interested again in these stories due to a chance
discovery of a hitherto overlooked article Masson had published
in Israel in 1976. Then a Freud believer, Masson quoted chapter
and verse to show that Freud never truly abandoned the seduc-
tion theory. Turned Freud basher, Masson never referred again
to his 1976 paper. Obviously, it was not Freud who had changed
since 1976—it was Masson.
The various stories add up to a cautionary tale that merits
revisiting: Masson’s turbulent story of love, betrayal, and Freud
bashing, the recent instances of Freud bashing, and the persist-
ing myth that Freud abandoned his ideas on seduction. The lat-
ter is also important in illuminating the seduction controversy
from the perspective of method versus theory (Lothane, 1999a).
THEORY VERSUS METHOD, MYTHOLOGY

VERSUS METHODOLOGY
We owe to Kant the distinction between practical reason and
pure reason, between a pragmatic, operational philosophy of do-
ing, and a speculative philosophy of being. Speculative philoso-
phy is also referred to as metaphysics. Freud called his specula-
FREUD’S SEDUCTION THEORY REVISITED 675
tive philosophy metapsychology, and, in a more whimsical vein,

his mythology. I dwell on mythology in order to set it apart from
methodology, or the science of method. In psychiatry and psy-
choanalysis, method (from the Greek words meta, “after,” and
hodos, “path”), is what can be operationalized as the technique
of psychotherapy, that is, the procedures and processes that can
be experienced in that situation both as doing and as undergo-
ing (Lothane, 1984b). The immortal Anna O, the codiscoverer
of psychoanalysis, called the method the “talking cure,” when
the word cure still meant treatment, not the successful end point
of treatment. In psychotherapy, a euphemism for therapy of the
word and by the word (Lothane, 1996d), the method is talking
and listening, engaging in a dialogue between two interlocutors,
in ways similar and yet different from everyday conversation. In
everyday life the partners in dialogue use language, both con-
crete and metaphorical, to communicate meanings, intentions,
needs, appeals, and demands: These are perennial aspects of be-
ing human and social. In therapy we do that, too, but sometimes
we bracket commonsense concern with goal-directed doings in
favor of fostering contemplation, or regression, so that we may
get in touch with memories of the forgotten past, with processes
of imagination in the form of dreams and daydreams, for psy-
choanalysis aims to build bridges between the conscious and the
unconscious, the rational and the nonrational, the life of reality
built around perception and the world of fantasy built up of
memories, dreams, desires, and even hallucinations (Lothane,
1982b). In addition, the psychotherapeutic dialogue is a love en-
counter that uses language and nonverbal ways of communica-
tion to express the deepest human need: to love and to be loved
in return (Lothane, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c, 1997a, 1998). In psy-
choanalysis and psychotherapy the method of free association is
an operational tool, or instrument, that discloses the mind at
work, especially in areas not probed in everyday conditions
(Balter, Lothane, & Spencer, 1980; Lothane, 1981, 1994). Here
is how I (Lothane, 1984a) traced these matters in Freud:
In his famous rejoinder to Einstein, Freud (1933b) expressed a
profound insight with his usual acerbic wit. “It may seem to you
as though our theories are a kind of mythology. . . . But does not
every science in the end come to a kind of mythology like this?
676 ZVI LOTHANE
Cannot the same be said to-day of your own Physics?” Earlier in

his career (Freud, 1914c), he spoke of both physics and psycho-
analysis when he stated that theories are “not the foundation of
science upon which everything rests; that is observation alone.
They are not the bottom but the top of the whole structure and
can be replaced and discarded without damaging it” (p. 77). By
contrast, he did not express himself with skepticism or irony
about his psychoanalytic method. He called it an instrument: “In
point of fact psycho-analysis is a method of research, an impartial
instrument, like the infinitesimal calculus, as it were” (Freud,
1927, p. 36). The method was instrumentally, or operationally,
conjoined with observation. (p. 65)
What Freud had in mind as his mythology were such abstract

concepts as instinctual drives, libido, narcissism, id, ego, self,
and the death instinct—notions that cannot be operationalized,
therefore in the realm of myths, but nonetheless retaining a
measure of usefulness in discourse.
Similar considerations apply to the concept of causality, a
perennial quest of mankind to know not only what is but what
is the cause of what is. In philosophy Hume demolished the con-
cept of cause, claiming we only know successions of events, not
their causes, and that cause is merely a psychological necessity.
A further corollary is that philosophical causes often shade into
the quest of ultimate causes—what caused the universe—notions
that are neither practical nor scientific but religious, such as the
Big Bang theory of creation versus creationism.
Nevertheless, in practical matters cause exists and is real. In
medicine causality, or etiology, is a practical necessity: We need
to know the cause of disorder in order to cure it. This raises the
question of causes specific to a given situation versus a cause
that can be generalized to more than one situation and turned
into a universal causal law. Whereas universal causality holds in
the sciences of matter, it can turn problematic in human affairs,
for no two situations and the people in them are exactly alike;
here generalizations may come dangerously close to becoming
myths. In human affairs, I submit, an etiology can easily become
a mythology and hence an ideology, thus lead to polemics. In
Greek polemos means “war”; in psychoanalysis debates about eti-
ology have led to wars of ideology, not as bloody as the church
wars of heresy, or as the wars between religion and science, but
often enough resulting in considerable suffering for the warring

parties.
These distinctions can now be used to formulate questions
about seduction: What is seduction and what is seduction the-
ory? What is method and what is mythology concerning the se-
duction theory? Seduction is what people do to or with each
other; seduction theory is ascribing to it a causal role in human
affairs. Our purpose is to trace how seduction as a doing, as a
fact of life, plays out in health and in disease in the realm of
psychoanalysis as a healing method, and, on the other hand, how
it was turned into the seduction theory, as the latter shaped various
philosophical theories and ideologies in psychoanalysis.
For seduction became seduction theory when by 1905 Freud
finally evolved from sexologist to a theorist of sexuality in his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, although he never used the
locution “seduction theory”. With this transition, a false antin-
omy was set up between sexual seduction and spontaneous sex-
ual desire, outer and inner reality, perception and imagination,
the dream as an adaptation to trauma and the dream as wish
fulfillment (Lothane, 1983a). As this antinomy hardened into
dogma, more in the eyes of the followers than in Freud himself,
psychoanalysts became enmeshed in quasi-religious wars con-
cerning the role of seduction.
THE WARS OF SEDUCTION
For our purpose, the history of the debates about seduction can
be divided into before and after Masson. It is not that before
Masson psychiatrists and psychoanalysts did not admit the reality
of seduction in their practices or in their clinical writings—they
did—but they showed no awareness of the contradictions in
Freud, adhered to the official story, and did not question the
theory as such (Winestine, 1985). Even though Masson’s per-
spective on seduction and Freud was wrong-headed in many
ways (Lothane, 1987a; Paul, 1985), he deserves credit for asking
questions and for having sparked a debate about seduction and
the abuse of children and women in our time. In response to
Masson, analysts began to explore the theoretical issues in the
678 ZVI LOTHANE
seduction theory (Garcia, 1987; Lothane, 1987b; Schimek, 1987;

Williams, 1987).
Masson was not the first to disagree with Freud on the
causal role of seduction and trauma in neurosis: The honor goes
to Sandor Ferenczi, Freud’s most beloved and betrayed analy-
sand and student and possibly his would-be son-in-law. Ignored
for decades and maligned as a mental case by such a pillar of
orthodoxy as Jones, Ferenczi is now receiving his posthumous
due recognition as one of the great pioneers of psychoanalysis.
In the decade of the 1920s Ferenczi became increasingly
aware that the method of free association, rigidly applied by a
silent analyst in conditions of complete abstinence, did not fare
well with sicker and severely traumatized patients. Another ana-
lyst who vigorously questioned the passive free association method
around that time was Wilhelm Reich, founder of the seminar on
technique at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who would later
call his new active approach character analysis. Ferenczi and Re-
ich became the forerunners of such methodological innovators
as Franz Alexander, Thomas Szasz, Heinz Kohut, Merton Gill,
and, last but not least, Kurt Eissler, all active in Chicago, and all
challengers of the citadel of orthodoxy that was the New York
Psychoanalytic Society as incarnated in the triumvirate of Hart-
mann, Kris, and Loewenstein.
Ferenczi’s roots were in the psychotherapeutic cathartic
method of Breuer and Freud (1893) and, like early Freud, he
traced adult neurosis to real traumatic experiences in childhood
(1931) and recommended a more active stance for the analyst.
Mindful of his roots, he named his new active therapeutic
method “neocatharsis,” that is, a cathartic method comple-
mented by his own discoveries in psychoanalysis. These innova-
tions were presented in papers with such titles as “The Further
Development of an ‘Active Therapy’ in Psycho-Analysis” (1921),
“The Elasticity of the Psychoanalytic Technique” (1928), and
“Relaxation Principle and Neocatharsis” (1930). The series cul-
minated in a most controversial paper, “Confusion of Tongues
between Parent and Child” (1933), read in 1932 at the Interna-
tional Congress of Psychoanalysis in Wiesbaden over Freud’s ve-
hement opposition, which resulted in the suppression of the pa-
per’s original title: “The Passions of Adults and Their Influence on
the Character and Sexual Development of Children” (unlike the

others, it was not published in the International Journal of Psycho-
Analysis until 1949). It was a compelling vindication of the trau-
matic etiology of the neuroses, reaffirming the reality of violent
sexual abuse in the lives of children and its deferred effect on pa-
thology in the adult.
But it was revolutionary in its two inescapable conclusions:
that it is the family craziness that drives the child crazy, and,
by extension, that the sins and failures of the analyst drive the
transference neurosis. Both were anathema to Freud and the
prevailing analytic orthodoxy that neurosis is self-contained pa-
thology, occurring in a more or less sane society and family, and,
by extension, that the analyst is a neutral blank screen except
when occasional and unwelcome countertransferences slip in. In
any event, from this view, fashioned by the monadic medical
model of disorder, there was no room for any interpersonal-dy-
adic conception of neurosis as a product of interaction between
the child and the parent, and of transference neurosis as inter-
action between the analysand and the analyst. But Ferenczi un-
derstood as early as 1912 that neurotic symptoms are an in-
teractional product. In addition to ideological reasons, Freud, I
believe, had an overriding personal reason to oppose Ferenczi
on this matter: his analyzing his own daughter Anna and casting
her, as in the case of the historic Anna O, in the role of a care-
taker of a sick father. This was a far cry from acting as the pro-
verbial neutral analyst whose job is just to interpret, and it con-
tributed to his blind spot. I have recently argued that there is a
hitherto unacknowledged interpersonal dynamic in Freud (Lo-
thane, 1995; Lothane, 1997a).
Not much was said about seduction or abuse of children
until the advent of analyst Robert Fliess. Robert was the son of
the famed Wilhelm Fliess, Freud’s closest friend from 1887 until
the tragic breakup of their friendship in 1903, who presided
over Freud’s birth as a psychoanalyst and inspired a number of
his ideas, among them infantile sexuality, as recorded by Freud
himself. In the foreword to a volume published in 1956, much
of which was a presentation and elaboration of Freud’s libido
theory and the psychosexual stages of development as outlined
in the Three Essays, Robert Fliess addressed the importance of
680 ZVI LOTHANE
uncovering memories of childhood trauma and was critical of

Freud having gone “too far in favoring fantasy at the cost of mem-
ory” (Fliess, 1956, p. xvii). R. Fliess maintained that “amnesia re-
moval uncovers much more frequently that Freud’s writing lead
one to expect memories . . . [that] one would declare erroneously
as fantasies of the polymorphously perverse child” (p. xvii), and
found that such memories had their cause in the perverse behav-
ior and “the unbelievable frequency of the (undiagnosed) ambulatory
psychosis” of the parent:
the child of such a parent becomes the object of defused aggres-

sion (maltreated and beaten almost within an inch of his life),
and of a perverse sexuality that hardly knows an incest barrier (is
seduced in the most bizarre ways by the parent, and, at his or her
instigation by others). Among the damages one may single out
one as perhaps the severest: it appears as though the child takes
over all the feelings of guilt over incest that the parent should
have had, but being psychotic, did not. This promotes an excessive
unconscious need for punishment, of which Freud had said that it
“sets the most stringent limitations to our therapeutic endeavor.”
(Fliess, 1956, pp. xvii-xviii)
This passage could have been written by Ferenczi or by any

other upholder of the interpersonal causation of emotional ill-
ness. In that book Fliess cites numerous cases from his own prac-
tice where actual seductions of patients took place in childhood,
without as yet mentioning Ferenczi. The omission was corrected
in R. Fliess’s (1973) Symbol, Dream and Psychosis where a number
of Ferenczi’s seminal writings on traumatization of children are
cited and where the index contains the entries “aggressive abuse
of child,” “father and abuse of child,” “sexual abuse of child,”
and “mother, psychotic,” again referring to Fliess’s own treat-
ment cases in which such abuse was amply documented.
Reviewing the literature of child abuse, Robert Fliess
quoted from Freud’s letters to his father Wilhelm, some of
which were published in 1950, and faulted Freud for first believ-
ing his patients’ memories were true and then demoting them
to mere fantasies: “Freud’s honeymoon with this truth was . . .
brief” (p. 208), characterizing Freud’s later equivocations about
the reality of memories of childhood seduction and trauma as
“regrettable” and “pathetic.” In that volume Fliess also quoted
extensively from Ferenczi’s “comprehensive anticipation of two

parts of [his] thesis of parental sexual and aggressive abuse of
the child.” “The trauma, especially the sexual trauma,” says Fer-
enczi, “as the pathogenic factor cannot be valued highly enough.
. . . The immediate explanation—that these are only sexual phan-
tasies of the child, a kind of hysterical lying—is unfortunately
made invalid by the number of such confessions, e.g., of assaults
upon children, committed by patients actually in analysis” (Fliess,
1973, pp. 212–213).
Robert Fliess summed it all up in a dramatic dictum that
would hit Masson like a bolt of lightning: “No one is ever made
sick by his fantasies. Only traumatic memories in repression can
cause the neurosis” (Fliess, 1973, p. 212). Fliess wanted to make
a point, but his statement is one-sided and thus misleading: Fan-
tasies and waking dreams of all sorts can and do make people
sick and suicidal, as long recognized in Kant’s version of the folk
wisdom that the madman is a dreamer wide awake. Just as trau-
matic abuse can make one sick, so can fantasies in persons suf-
fering from a masochistic character disorder who were not
abused themselves but who witnessed the abuse of others. Fact,
fantasy, and memory, reminiscences and retrospective revisions
of memory—these are not mutually contradictory; they are not
either/or but both/and propositions. It is a matter of acknowl-
edging and appreciating in situations how such fantasies are
nourished by memories of past trauma and how they affect cur-
rent behavior.
R. Fliess’s findings and conclusions were not embraced by
psychoanalysts, and were not sensationalized in the press. In a
postscript to his book Fliess wrote, “It has taken time to recog-
nize isolation as another blessing.” Later his widow would write
to Dr. Milton Klein that because of his views, Fliess was relieved
of teaching a course at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
Today such views about parental trauma and the traumatogenic
effect of the analyst on the patient are widely accepted. Heinz
Kohut hailed the analyst in the second analysis of Mr. Z (a hid-
den autobiographical account of his own analysis with Ruth Eis-
sler) for having validated the perception that the patient’s trau-
matogenic mother had been psychotic.
An unexpected bonanza for the traumatic origin of adult
682 ZVI LOTHANE
illness materialized in the researches of W. G. Niederland, from

1959 to 1989, into the alleged abuse of Paul Schreber by his
paranoidogenic father Moritz, a throwback to the earlier debates
in American psychiatry concerning the schizophrenogenic mother.
Even though I consider Niederland’s conclusions regarding the
traumatogenic impact of Schreber’s father unproved, I honor
Niederland as the pioneer of Schreber studies in our time and
an important authority on the traumas of Holocaust survivors.
However, I emphasize the dynamic role played by mother and
wife, the son’s identification with his father’s moralistic ideas re-
garding sexual gratification, and near-sexual and nonsexual
abuse of Schreber in Flechsig’s and other asylums (Lothane,
1989a, 1989b, 1992b, 1993). Niederland did not attack Freud for
having overlooked parental abuse in Schreber, as would later his
follower and rival, Morton Schatzman; rather, Niederland
sought to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the
causal role of the alleged trauma and the causal role of the son’s
supposed homosexual longings for his father by positing that
the father stimulated the son erotically by administering enemas,
another unproved assumption. Be that as it may, Niederland and
Schatzman, a follower of Ronald Laing, called attention to real,
not just fantasied, traumatic experiences in childhood and their
deferred pathogenic consequences for the adult—actually, an
early basic insight in Freud that fell by the wayside. It was this
deferred impact of seduction as pleasure and seduction as pain,
first in the form of a self-contained infantile neurosis and later
repeated as the transference neurosis, that Freud promulgated
in his case histories (1895d), his 1896 papers (1896a, 1896b,
1896c), and later in the Wolf Man case (1918). Before and after
Schatzman, the role of trauma was argued with great cogency
and eloquence in a series of articles and books by Leonard Shen-
gold (1963, 1967, 1968, 1978, 1979, 1989), who adopted Schre-
ber’s term “soul murder” to refer to the soul-killing traumato-
genic behavior of adults toward helplessly victimized children
but did not get into the inconsistencies of the official story.
ENTER MASSON
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson “grew up primarily in Los Angeles.
. . . [His] family was Jewish, but both parents were vegetarian
and heavily involved in Indian philosophy . . . [and] discussions

about past lives, ancient manuscripts, [and] far-off places” (Mas-
son, 1990, p. 205), all under the spell of guru Paul Brunton, who
inspired Masson to go to Harvard to study Sanskrit and Bud-
dhist and Hindu texts. Masson became a tenured professor of
Sanskrit in Toronto, and by 1970 found himself drawn to “psy-
choanalysis . . . another secret doctrine complete with a guru,
Freud, and complex tenets” (Masson, 1990, p. 207). He enrolled
as candidate at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute.
In 1973 in Denver, at the spring meeting of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, starry-eyed candidate Masson deliv-
ered his “first analytic paper on the ‘mad Dr. Schreber’ ” (Mas-
son, 1990, p. 115), agreeing with Niederland that the alleged
brutality of Moritz Schreber toward his son caused the son’s
adult psychosis, with Niederland and Shengold in the audience.
According to Malcolm’s (1984) re-creation of the event, Shen-
gold reminisced as follows: “Niederland delivered some pre-
pared comments on Jeff’s paper, and he played down the distur-
bance in Schreber’s father. He minimized it, saying he wouldn’t
necessarily call the man psychotic or an evil influence; . . . so I
stood up to defend Jeff” (pp. 82–83). But why would Niederland
want to defend Schreber against Masson, seeing that Niederland
had said the same about Moritz Schreber? At a later time Nieder-
land would contemplate suing Schatzman for plagiarism: In his
1973 best-seller Schatzman claimed that even though Niederland
came up with findings about the father, it was he, Schatzman,
who was the author of a new and true theory about Paul Schre-
ber’s soul murder, now renamed persecution.1 To paraphrase
Dante, ye who seek perfect consistency among analysts, abandon
all hope—but, then, why should they be any more perfect than
other learned men?
Such paltry contradictions paled in comparison with the
thrill of meeting Kurt Eissler and the beginning of “an unex-
pected friendship . . . completely nonsexual, nonetheless roman-
tic. . . . we both behaved as if we were somehow infatuated, both
intellectually and emotionally” (Masson, 1990, p. 116). Eminent
Eissler was then Director of Freud Archives at the Library of
Congress and a man known for his near-fanatic defense of
Freud: In Eissler’s eyes, in contradistinction to other Freudians,
684 ZVI LOTHANE
such as Jacob Arlow or Leo Stone, Freud was an infallible ge-

nius. But can’t even a genius make a mistake? Eissler felt that
Masson “had a very positive attitude toward Freud. There was
never any indication that he did not think Freud was a great
man. Eissler loved him quite beyond expectation” (Malcolm,
1984, pp. 11–12). Seven years later, in 1980, Eissler would be-
stow on Masson his greatest gift: an appointment as his succes-
sor as Secretary of the Freud Archives. Their love affair would
end tragically a year later.
Whatever the rivalries in interpreting Schreber, one issue
was crystal clear: Masson sided with Niederland, was convinced
of the reality of children being traumatized by adults, and went
on to say more about this in the aforementioned publication
in Israel of his paper “Perversions: Some Observations.” Citing
Valenstein’s view that “the perverse act has a prototype in literal
experience,” Masson (1976) went on say: “This much [i.e., the
experience basis of perversions] is beyond dispute. The question
takes on controversial aspects when we ask where this childhood
prototype derives from. The problem is as old as Freud’s views
on seduction which, as we ceaselessly hear, he soon gave up in
favour of the true psychoanalytic theory of the causative power
of pure fantasies” (p. 354). In that paper Masson was unequivo-
cally critical of the idea that Freud gave up his views on seduc-
tion, for in a lengthy footnote Masson offered this vigorous re-
buttal: “Freud never retracted the theory in toto as has too often
been erroneously assumed” (p. 354), citing mitigating state-
ments: from later writings of Freud; the Fliess dictum “no one is
ever made sick by his fantasies,” Ferenczi’s (1933) “Confusion of
Tongues,” and papers by Shengold (1963, 1967, 1968; Orgel &
Shengold, 1968).
By 1978 Masson was graduated as a psychoanalyst, was now
a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and
was invited to join the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society, be-
coming a much lionized darling of the inner circle and on the
threshold of becoming an insider. In a paper published jointly
with his then-wife (Masson & Masson, 1978), presented a year
earlier at the 30th International Psychoanalytic Congress in Jeru-
salem, Masson reaffirmed the significance of trauma. Invoking
Freud’s linking dreams to childhood experiences, Masson averred
once again, “This is not to deny psychic reality to fantasies but

only to stress the importance of traumatic experiences in shaping
fantasy and permitting its persistence and pathogenic effects” (p.
201, emphasis in original), and cited his 1976 paper, perhaps for
the last time. That 1976 paper was not cited in The Assault on
Truth, nor did he explain in 1984 why he changed views he once
held about Freud’s retraction of the seduction theory. Was Mas-
son in the throes of suppression or repression? But before we
look into Masson’s assault on Freud, there are a few predeces-
sors that deserve mention.
From the 1960s through the end of the 1970s there had
been a sporadic interest in seduction in the psychoanalytic litera-
ture, with a spate of contributions about seduction in docu-
mented clinical cases (Silber, 1979), but most eloquently by
Shengold. Concurrently a trend began, especially among psycho-
analysts of other, so-called revisionist schools, to delve into
Freud’s formulations in his classical case histories and to favor
the allegedly discarded seduction theory as being more in keep-
ing with interpersonal and adaptive conceptions, stressing those
rather than intrapsychic fantasies stemming from infantile sexu-
ality (Slipp, 1977). The Dora case especially became the focus of
countless reappraisals, supposedly reaching a mythical figure of
one thousand.
Around 1979 seduction, abuse, fantasy, and memory were
very much on the mind of Dr. Milton I. Klein, an analyst from
the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health in New York City,
and his coworker David Tribich. In 1979 Klein and Tribich pub-
lished “Freud’s Blindness” (reissued under a different title in
1982), arguing that “in his five major cases Freud described de-
structive behavior on the part of his patients’ parents, but he did
not see it as destructive. He presents data that indicate these
parents deceived, threatened, bullied, beat and tortured their
children,” remaining “himself peculiarly blind to the effects of
such mistreatments” (p. 52). The authors were right with one
notable exception, Schreber: There are no archival data showing
how the father actually treated the son, or what their relation-
ship was like, and Paul Schreber was never Freud’s patient, a
widely held misconception. Freud held Schreber’s father in high
esteem, and it was only in a then-unpublished letter to Ferenczi
686 ZVI LOTHANE
that Freud wondered whether Moritz Schreber might have been

a despot in his household. Klein and Tribich attributed Freud’s
blindness to his clinging to the idea of primal fantasies and in-
fantile sexuality rather than being open to the interpersonal na-
ture of love and aggression. Without seduction mentioned even
once, here was a paper that expressed the main ideas of Mas-
son’s forthcoming book in a nutshell, receiving only a sliver of
recognition in the reportage of Blumenthal and Malcolm and
none of the fanfare. But, of course, the modest Dr. Klein had
none of the high-profile rhetorical skills or character attributes
of Jeffrey Masson.
In the fall of 1981 in New York I was introduced to Dr.
Klein by Dr. Joseph Reppen, currently the editor of Psychoanalyt-
ical Psychology, who knew of my interest in the seduction theory.
That year Klein (1981) published a historical essay on Freud’s
changing views on the seduction theory in which he claimed that
in giving up the theory “Freud made neither a ‘discovery’ nor an
‘error’ nor did he almost make a ‘fatal mistake.’ What he did was
to reinterpret the theoretical significance of his clinical data
while having little scientific reason to do so” (Klein, 1979, pp.
186–187). While, as a follower of Robert Fliess, Klein was reaf-
firming the importance of real events and memory versus fan-
tasy, Klein was not emphatic enough that Freud never truly
abandoned the seduction and trauma theory but rather strug-
gled to overcome the apparent antinomy of remembered events
versus fantasied events, historic reality versus psychic reality, a
debate within Freud that never ceased, and to balance the patho-
genic weight of real events, memories of events, and the fanta-
sies they become entwined with.
Klein’s was a sober paper, without any vocal reproach
against Freud, except via the quotations from Robert Fliess and
from Ferenczi’s (1933) “Confusion of Tongues,” and a veiled al-
lusion, in the references but not the text, to Max Schur’s (1972)
book, Freud Living and Dying. In that book Schur, an internist
turned analyst who treated Freud for his jaw cancer until his
death, retold a horrendous story already revealed earlier (Schur,
1966), about the historical patient behind the most famous of
Freud’s dreams from The Interpretation of Dreams, nicknamed the
Dream of Irma’s Injection. Behind the mask of Irma lurked
Emma Eckstein, Freud’s hysteric patient, whom he had referred

to his friend Wilhelm Fliess for an operation on the nose that
almost cost Emma her life due to Fliess’s negligence: A big ball
of surgical gauze was left by Fliess in Emma’s nasal cavity, caus-
ing a near-fatal hemorrhage. As would happen later with Jung
and Sabina Spielrein (Lothane, 1996b, 1999b), Freud went out
on a limb to exculpate his friend against the victim: The bleed-
ing, said Freud, was not organic but hysterical, due to longings
for Fliess. The story was revealed in ten letters from Freud to
Fliess that were omitted from the expurgated edition (Freud,
1950) but given to Dr. Schur under a special dispensation from
Anna Freud. That story, cited by Masson in his rambling 1978
paper, had no direct connection to infantile trauma or seduc-
tion, but it was for him a paradigm of the traumatogenic con-
duct of the psychoanalyst in the doctor-patient relationship and,
via transference, of the adult in the life of the child. Who could
imagine that one day this story would turn into dynamite for
Masson and catapult him into the career of a male feminist?
Dr. Klein, who had heard about Masson from a number of
sources, including Marianne Krüll (author of a 1979 book in
which she suggests that Jacob Freud traumatized his son Sig-
mund), became the unwitting founder of Masson’s fame and for-
tune. Milton Klein’s coworker David Tribich happened to be a
brother-in-law of Ralph Blumenthal, a science reporter for The
New York Times. In the early summer of 1981 Blumenthal was so
excited by the information he got from Klein and Tribich about
Masson having laid hands on Freud’s unpublished letters that he
traveled to California to meet with Masson, who also pressed
into his hands the typescript of his “Yale lecture,” the nickname
of a paper he had just delivered in New Haven at the June meet-
ing of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society. Upon
his return, Blumenthal published two articles in the science sec-
tion of The New York Times, “Scholars Seek the Hidden Freud in
Newly Emerging Letters” (August 18, 1981) and “Did Freud’s
Isolation, Peer Rejection Prompt Key Theory Reversal” (August
25). Blumenthal re-created not only the gist of Masson’s lecture
in New Haven but cited a number of other current revisions and
sensations concerning Freud, not directly related to seduction.
These articles created a storm in the press, became a source for
688 ZVI LOTHANE
Janet Malcolm’s articles and book, enraged many Freudian psy-

choanalysts, and were the beginning of Masson’s fall from grace.
THE HIGHER THEY RISE, THE HARDER THEY FALL
The great Osler warned doctors in pursuit of fame to beware of

the Delilah of the press: “There are times when she may be cour-
ted with satisfaction, but beware! Sooner or later she is sure to
play the harlot, and has left many a man shorn of his strength,
namely, the confidence of his professional brethren.” He deter-
mined that the resulting “mental lethargy,” caused by “an exclu-
sive dietary [of] the press and magazine” could be cured by “the
library [that] supplies the vitamins which counteract” it (Bean,
n. d., pp. 60–61). The conflict of interest seems to be perennial
and insoluble: Reporters need to write sizzling copy, authors
want to propagate their truths, and the two often mix to pro-
duce explosive consequences for both parties, as would happen
to Malcolm and Masson.
Masson’s (1981) June lecture in New Haven, in which he
made no reference to his 1976 paper, was accurately described
by Malcolm (1984) as “respectful of psychoanalysis and Freud
and its tone was scholarly and fairly quiet . . . on the whole sober,
and even, in places, as tedious, as the general run of psychoana-
lytic papers. The bulk of it was devoted to an extravagantly admir-
ing discussion of Freud’s 1896 paper on the seduction theory,
“The Aetiology of Hysteria” . . . and to a pedantic and hard to
follow argument regarding the possible influence of a certain Dr.
Löwenfeld on Freud’s decision to abandon the theory. (p. 53)
“Afterward,” recalled Masson (1990), “when I asked for
questions, there was a deathly silence.” Later, fielding a ques-
tion, Masson said: “Yes, I do think Freud made a gigantic mis-
take. Every patient whose memory of abuse was treated as noth-
ing more than wishful thinking will have to be recalled” (pp.
190–191). Other reactions were re-created by Malcolm: “Now
look, ladies and gentlemen,” Masson told Malcolm, “do you re-
ally believe that there is no difference between a fantasy and a
reality?” When they said, “Well, you know, Freud has said it very
clearly: there is important distinction to be made,” Masson re-
torted, “What do you do with something like Auschwitz?” One

analyst shot back at him with “Let me tell you a story. I had a
patient who came out of Auschwitz at the age of fifteen, and . . .
he told me, ‘Auschwitz made a man out of me.’ ” That analyst
was also right: Samuel Pisar, a youthful survivor of Auschwitz,
became a man, an international lawyer with celebrity status, and
a friend of the Kennedys and the Giscard d’Estaings, and wrote
a book to prove it (Pisar, 1980). The events in New Haven
sounded like a piece of repetition compulsion. Three years ear-
lier the inaugural paper Masson read at the San Francisco Soci-
ety, presciently titled “The Navel of Neurosis: Trauma, Memory
and Denial,” was met with similar criticisms. “Jeff,” said Victor
Calef, “I am disappointed. . . . I can’t even hide the fact that I
am angry with you. It reads like the paper of somebody who has
not seen very many patients. Otherwise you would know how
often women do, actually, fantasize sexual seductions” (Masson,
1990, p. 137). Edward Weinshel said, “Jeff, Freud abandoned
the seduction theory. . . . You would do well to listen to Freud”
(Masson, 1990, p. 137). Did Masson listen to Freud? Did the ana-
lysts, who felt so disappointed?
Clearly, the debaters reached the proverbial pons asinorum,
but all this was milk-fed puppy compared to what erupted follow-
ing the appearance of Blumenthal’s pieces. During the lecture
Masson delivered a mighty Parthian shot. As Masson told Mal-
colm, “I tacked it on at the last minute, and it was totally gratu-
itous, I don’t know why I put it in” (Malcolm, 1984, pp. 53–54;
Malcolm, personal communication-letter of September 14, 1995).
The offensive statement was printed by Blumenthal (1981b) in
the second article as follows: “By shifting the emphasis from a
real world of sadness, misery, and cruelty, to an internal stage
on which actors performed invented drams for an invisible audi-
ence of their own creation . . . Freud began a trend away from
the real world that, it seemed to me, has come to a dead halt in
the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis throughout the world.”
These words about sterility, reprinted three years later in an arti-
cle in Atlantic Monthly (Masson, 1984b), were fighting words, and
they stung like a correct interpretation, more than any other crit-
icism from the pen of Masson. For Masson hit a sensitive nerve
and was in some strange way right, as would later be acknowl-
690 ZVI LOTHANE
edged by Eissler himself (Masson, 1990). In those years a similar

message had been spreading in the shape of Heinz Kohut’s self
psychology, an indictment of the sterility of classical, supposedly
orthodox, psychoanalytic technique. Kohut, who acknowledged
no predecessor, followed Ferenczi in decrying the rigidity of psy-
choanalysts who failed to show empathy toward the analysand—
the narcissistic-empathic failures of unempathic analysts, recapit-
ulating traumas of unempathic parents. I restated Kohut’s
message as the failure to acknowledge the role of love (Lothane,
1987a, 1987b, 1987c, 1998). In attacking what appeared as Mas-
son’s arrogance, analysts seemed to be missing the writing on
the wall.
While the unpublished letters from Freud to Fliess quoted
in the Blumenthal articles (prior to official authorization by
Anna Freud and thus adding to the aura of scandal) added sub-
tlety to Freud’s published recantation letter of September 21,
1897, they did not materially alter the historical record. Never-
theless, the New Haven lecture was transformed into a piece of
rabid anti-Freudism by that strange chemistry, an almost uncon-
scious collusion, that often takes place between a subject and a
reporter and, of course, by the overreaction of the analysts. In
his reportage Blumenthal overstated the newness of Masson’s
revelations about Emma Eckstein, omitting any mention of
Schur’s contributions, and spiced the story up with additional
and unrelated sensations concerning Freud. The impression was
created that Masson betrayed the trust of Anna Freud and Kurt
Eissler by rushing to disseminate seemingly compromising and
inflammatory fragments from the letters, as the following one
where Freud cites an admonition from Breuer concerning his
new sexual theories: “According to him I should ask myself every
day whether I am suffering from moral insanity or scientific
paranoia” (Freud, 1887–1904, letter 89 in the German edition;
American edition, p. 175). Incidentally, scientific paranoia is a
good term to describe a scientist who sees his pet idea confirmed
everywhere, even if the proof is tenuous.
Coming from upstart Masson, these words about the steril-
ity of psychoanalysis were seen as overweening chutzpah, as bit-
ing the hand that fed him. Was it worth it? Wasn’t Masson soon
to take over the Freud documents deposited at the Library of
Congress and, as Eissler promised him, to “do what you want,”

opening it to the droves of researchers clamoring for declassifi-
cation? Kurt Eissler was less charitable than the analysts in New
Haven, sending a “testy critique . . . [to] his protegé” on Septem-
ber 23, 1981, combining his criticism of the “Yale lecture” with
the reaction to the storm caused by Blumenthal pieces in The
New York Times:
Is it so surprising that Freud discovered a wrong theory to be
wrong? . . . You claim that Freud dropped the seduction theory
because Krafft-Ebing and the rest of the audience [at Freud’s lec-
ture of May 2, 1896 on “The Etiology of Hysteria” paper] rejected
it. This is quite impossible, because the new theory, which he
published in 1905 [i.e., the sexual theory of the neuroses in the
Three Essays—Z. L.] got him even in greater trouble and disrepute
than the theory of 1895 [sic]. Your reasoning makes no sense.
. . . the reader must conclude that the seduction theory was cor-
rect, and that Freud dropped it for unscientific reasons. I do hope
that you do not plan to write such things in your introduction of
the Freud-Fliess letters. You propose here—without documenta-
tion—the existence of a trait in Freud’s character which implies a
grave accusation against his reliability, honesty and solidity. (Mal-
colm, 1984, pp. 115–116)
Eissler was wrong to say that the seduction theory was wrong,
but right that Freud did not replace seduction with the Three
Essays out of opportunism or lack of courage. It was the sexual
theories of 1905 that made people like Aschaffenburg and
Bleuler cringe, and moved Alfred Hoche, a noted German fo-
rensic psychiatrist, to denounce Freud’s sexual theories at a psy-
chiatric meeting in 1913 as a matter fit for the criminal police.
Later Freud critics would accuse him of pansexualism.
The protests over the stuff published in The New York Times
were piling up high, and now Eissler “was clearly in a rage . . .
every day I get many phone calls, from all over the world about
how awful you are. How awful this article is. How bad it all is
for psychoanalysis. Is this the way to repay my kindness to you?”
(Masson, 1990, p. 193). The members of the board of the Freud
Archives were also in an uproar: “You should not have spoken
to The New York Times,” “you should have been more discreet,”
“you showed poor judgment,” “you have abandoned the major
tenets of psychoanalysis,” Masson was told at a meeting on No-
692 ZVI LOTHANE
vember 14, 1981 (Masson, 1990, pp. 198, 199). The die was cast
and corporate mentality prevailed: Masson was summarily fired,
which gave Blumenthal another opportunity to produce a bomb-
shell in The New York Times: “Freud Archives Research Chief Re-
moved Over Yale Talk.”
In 1983 Masson’s assessment of the effect of his discoveries
and his talk to Malcolm was nothing short of braggadocio: “They
would have to recall every patient since 1901. It would be like
the Pinto” (p. 19); “They sensed that I could single-handedly
bring down the whole business. And let’s face it, there is a lot of
money in that business. And they were right to be frightened,
because what I was discovering was dynamite” (p. 35). Were the
analysts frightened? Did the pillars of the temple tremble? Both
the board and Masson overreacted in this reciprocally enacted
transference storm, showing that social interactions cannot be
understood with the help of individual dynamics alone; group
dynamics are a sine qua non for grasping the situation as a whole
(Lothane, 1997b).
Thirteen years after these events Eissler (1994), still in the
clutches of either/or thinking, asserted apodictically that “seduc-
tion and impulse have hardly anything in common” and that it
was “Freud’s recognition of the spontaneity of infantile sexuality
that sounded the death-knell for the seduction theory” (p. 8),
and was still preoccupied with the ghost of Jeffrey Mason (Lo-
thane, 1996e). Anna Freud’s reaction was milder: “I was also put
off by the second article in The New York Times. . . . I felt almost
certain that the writer of the article misunderstood you and that
the interpretation concerning the seduction theory was his and
not yours. I just could not imagine that it could be yours” (Mal-
colm, 1984, p. 62). Anna Freud was not only charitable to Mas-
son but was correct in pointing out to Masson that her father did
not cave in under external pressure, nor was there any secrecy in
his abandoning the theory, ending that letter on an impassioned
cri de coeur: “Keeping up the seduction theory would mean to
abandon the Oedipus complex, and with it the whole impor-
tance of fantasy life, conscious or unconscious fantasy. In fact, I
think there would have been no psychoanalysis afterwards” (p.
63). In a similar vein Anna Freud wrote to Milton Klein on Janu-
ary 13, 1982: “I never thought that there was any doubt that my
father gave up the seduction theory. Certainly it was his clinical

work and constant contact with patients. That it occurred in the
patients’ material so frequently could in the long run not be at-
tributed to reality, but only to a fantasy of overwhelming gener-
ality. It seemed to me that this is the opinion that he himself
expressed in his writings” (unpublished letter, courtesy of Dr.
Klein).
But Eissler and Anna Freud were wrong in attributing to
Freud the false antinomy of seduction and infantile sexuality, of
trauma and fantasy. Their shared fear that keeping the seduction
theory would spell the demise of the most cherished tenets of
psychoanalysis curiously mirrors Masson’s boasting that he would
bring the whole edifice of psychoanalysis down with his “revela-
tions.” Freud clearly allows for the coexistence of seduction and
infantile sexuality in his Three Essays, allegedly the locus classicus
of the official recantation of the seduction theory, where Freud
says that infantile
sexual activity is determined by internal causes and external con-
tingencies, both of which can be guessed in cases of neurotic ill-
ness from the form taken by their symptoms and it can be discov-
ered with certainty by psychoanalytic investigation. . . . great and
lasting importance attaches at this period to accidental external
[Freud’s emphasis] contingencies. In the foreground we find the
effects of seduction, which treats the child as a sexual object pre-
maturely and teaches him, in highly emotional circumstances,
how to obtain satisfaction from his genital zones, which he is
obliged to repeat again and again by masturbation. . . . I cannot
admit [emphasis added] that in my paper “On the Aetiology of
Hysteria” (1896c) [reference is 1896a in the present paper] I exag-
gerated the importance of that influence, though I did not then
know that persons who remain normal [emphasis added] have had
the same experience in their childhood, and though I conse-
quently overrated the importance of seduction in comparison
with the factors of sexual constitution and development. (Freud,
1905, p. 190)
The blind spot of Eissler and Anna Freud and other analysts, in
flagrant contradiction to Freud’s own words, is another example
of perpetuating a psychoanalytic myth, an ideological cult phe-
nomenon (Lothane, 1983a).
In his farewell letter to his lost adopted son, Masson, Eissler
wrote:
694 ZVI LOTHANE
You will recall that I informed you loyally and faithfully whenever
I was told that you were indiscreet, dishonest, an inefficient histo-
rian, gossipy, bragging, etc. All these accusations and suspicions
were rejected by me because I loved you and believed in you.
When the two unfortunate interviews were published in The New
York Times, I tried to deny that you had committed a terrible
gaffe. Only after hearing from one Board member after another
they had been shocked by the interviews, and after repeatedly
rereading the second one, I had no argument left in your defense.
(Malcolm, 1984, pp. 152–153)
This was a tragic ending to a moving love story, and our heart
goes out to Eissler and to Masson. It shows that one man, no
matter how loving, cannot oppose the will of the group and that
there are limits to the redeeming power of love over direct, or
displaced, fury. Masson also forfeited the friendship of Anna
Freud, and, ostensibly for not paying dues, his membership in
the San Francisco, the Canadian, and International Psychoana-
lytic societies: His career as analyst came to an end.
However misguided these debates about the seduction the-
ory, Masson is also guilty of having suppressed or repressed what
he had read in Freud about seduction as sexual abuse. For nei-
ther in his published nor unpublished writings did Freud ever
deny the world of cruelty, sadness, and misery in which some
children lived. Thus, in his paper “Further Remarks on the Neu-
ropsychoses of Defense” (1896b), cited by Masson in his paper
of 1976, in anticipation of criticism of the generalization, “I have
found this specific determinant of hysteria—sexual passivity dur-
ing the presexual period—in every case of hysteria (including two
males cases),” (p. 163) Freud counters with arguments that have
escaped Masson’s notice:
the most immediate objections to this conclusion will probably be
that sexual assaults on small children happen too often for them to have
any aetiological importance [emphasis added], or that these sorts of
experiences are found to be without effect precisely because they
happen to a person who is sexually undeveloped; and further,
that one must beware of forcing on patients supposed reminis-
cences of this kind by questioning them, or of believing the ro-
mances they themselves invent. In reply to the latter objections
we may ask that no one should form too certain judgments in
this obscure field until one has made use of the only method
which can throw light on it—of psycho-analysis for the purpose of
making conscious what has so far been unconscious. (Freud,

1896b, p. 164)
And in an unpublished letter to Fliess of December 22, 1897,
only three months after the supposedly definitive retraction let-
ter of September 21 of that year, which Masson used to incrimi-
nate Freud, Freud describes a heartrending story of a sex victim
and the deferred explosion of the censored, that is, repressed,
memory of the trauma during the victims’ later outbreak of psy-
chosis, to end with these words, that would later be echoed in
Robert Fliess’s formulations: “Have you ever seen a foreign
newspaper which went through Russian censorship at the bor-
der? . . . Such Russian censorship occurs in psychoses and pro-
duces the apparently meaningless deliria [old term for delu-
sions]. A new motto: “What have they done to you, poor child?”
[from Goethe’s poem Mignon]. But now enough of my filthy sto-
ries. (Freud, 1887–1904, letter 151; p. 289)
Rather than denying the reality of child abuse and incest
publicly or privately, Freud became aware early on that the very
ubiquitousness of abuse and incest could not be the basis of a
universal etiological theory, in the sense of a valid medical or scien-
tific etiology, because of the infinite variability of individual re-
sponses to actual trauma and its variable persistence in memory;
because some stories of such abuse were fabricated as retrospec-
tive fantasies, not memories; and because some survivors of sex-
ual abuse remained unaffected in later life. Freud insisted that a
painstaking application of the psychoanalytic method of investi-
gation would help sift true from false recollections, and he was
amazingly prescient about the dangers of excessive credulity, as
seen in the recent witch-hunts of alleged child abusers and vic-
tims of the false memory syndrome.
Moreover, it is clear, as Masson himself had noted and Blu-
menthal faithfully depicted, that Freud’s famous retraction letter
of September 21, 1897, was only a passing phase in a long strug-
gle with the idea. Back in 1976 Masson had cited Freud’s “Fur-
ther Remarks” (1896b), but not the crucial aforementioned pas-
sage on page 164. However, Masson did cite the footnote Freud
added in 1924, appearing on page 168 of that same paper
(Freud, 1896b): In it Freud refers to his “error” of having “attrib-
uted the aetiological factor of seduction a significance and uni-
696 ZVI LOTHANE
versality which it did not possess [but which was corrected by] an
insight into the spontaneous manifestations of sexuality of chil-
dren which I described in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Nevertheless, we need not reject everything written in the text
above. Seduction retains a certain aetiological importance, and
even to-day I think some of these psychological comments are to
the point” (Freud, 1896b, p. 168, emphasis added). Freud will reaf-
firm this point in his lecture on femininity in 1933.
The New Haven lecture and the Blumenthal pieces were
merely a dress rehearsal for the final act, The Assault on Truth and
other writings of 1984, in which Masson waged an all-out war on
Freud and the Freudian establishment. Self-confidence would be
an understatement to describe Masson’s bragging about his forth-
coming book to Malcolm: “Wait till it [The Assault on Truth]
reaches the best-seller list, watch how the analysts will crawl,” boas-
ted Masson, “they will want me back, they will say that Masson was
a great scholar, a major analyst—after Freud he’s the greatest ana-
lyst who ever lived. . . . ‘Please take back what you have said about
our profession; our patients are quitting,’ . . . Judgment will be
passed by history. There is no possible refutation of the book. It is
going to cause a revolution in psychoanalysis. Analysis stands or
falls with me now” (p. 162). Masson (1995) claims to this day he
never said to Malcolm that he was the greatest analyst who ever
lived. While male analysts panned the book, feminists loved it:
Harvard psychiatrist “Herman [1981] calls the book fascinating, ‘a
lavishly documented, carefully reasoned work’ . . . Psychologist
Phyllis Chessler, author of “Women and Madness,” calls [it] ‘an act
of bravery,’ and the response to it an act of character assassination.
Harvard psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller recalls that until a few years
ago, sexual abuse of children went ignored and psychiatric text-
books of the mid-1970s said its occurrence was one in a million”
(Swartz, 1984).
Masson’s assault on Freud also turned out to be a disguise
for bashing his former analyst in Toronto (Masson, 1990), con-
firming my intuition that “Masson acted and lived the part of an
abused and abandoned child of psychoanalysis” (Lothane,
1987a, p. 99), and, I would now add, the seduced, in the sense
of enticed, child as well. Masson’s lament came and went, and
psychoanalysis is still with us, but mightily buffeted by such winds

of change as demographic shifts, the proliferation of pharmaco-
therapies, and the health maintenance organizations.
The success of the book was helped by other simultaneous
and unrelated developments. On the one hand, there were Mas-
son’s predecessors in the advocacy of the abused children and
adults, and especially women: Florence Rush (1980), Judith Her-
man (1981), and Alice Miller (1983, 1984). In addition, the 1980s
were becoming the decade of the abused child in the media, as
exemplified by this article in The New York Times: “Sexual Abuse
of Children Draws Experts’ Increasing Concern Nationwide”
(Lindsey, 1984). Like Schatzman’s book a decade earlier, Mas-
son’s book hit a sensitive nerve in the population at large. Pulled
by these trends, Masson left the analytic consulting room for
the public advocacy of women and children and the quest of
celebrity.
Masson sued the board of the Freud Archives for firing him
and collected a handsome settlement paid by psychoanalyst and
benefactress of psychoanalysis Muriel Gardiner. In 1984 Masson
sued Janet Malcolm for libel on the grounds that in her report-
age she had damaged him by fabricating many of the quotes.
Some of the quotes were later found on the tapes while others,
Malcolm explained, were recorded as notes that could no longer
be found. During the legal saga that lasted over a decade, Mas-
son swore under oath that no notes were ever taken and that he
never said to Malcolm he “was like an intellectual gigolo,” that
he would turn Anna Freud’s home into a place of “sex, women,
fun,” or claimed that “after Freud, I’m the greatest analyst that
ever lived” (Masson, 1995). Though he did not deny all the state-
ments he had made to Malcolm, an impression was created that
Malcolm had breached journalistic ethics by fabricating quota-
tions, drawing bitter criticisms from fellow journalists, a charge
Malcolm steadfastly denied. There were two libel trials: In the
first the jury found against Malcolm but remained hung on the
issue of damages; in the second trial the jury acquitted Malcolm.
In 1989, at the annual meeting of the American Academy
of Psychoanalysis, I organized a meet-the-author session for Mas-
son to introduce his book of 1988 critical of abuses in therapy,
698 ZVI LOTHANE
mostly in institutional settings. The discussion was very lively,

with therapists arguing for and against Masson. But Masson was
only able to criticize, without offering suggestions how to rem-
edy the problems. His call to abolish all psychotherapy, because
of so many rotten apples, could be likened to a proposal to do
away with parenthood, just because there are so many bad par-
ents. Clearly, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are here to stay,
but they might never be the same.
An unexpected dénoument vindicating Janet Malcolm was
serendipitously provided by her two-year-old granddaughter,
who found the pad containing the disputed missing notes and
quotes. On August 25, 1995, Anthony Lewis reported that the
notes were now on file in the court. “If so,” concluded Lewis,
“Mr. Masson’s sworn statement was as false as his denials of hav-
ing said things that turned out on tape.” In a letter to the editor
of The New York Times published on September 23, 1995, Masson
(1995) expressed disbelief about the notes and challenging Mal-
colm to a new trial, repeated his more than a decade-old slur:
“Freud . . . denied the actual extent of child sexual abuse be-
cause of a failure of moral courage.” Freud, too, was known for
his stubbornness.
In summary, Masson’s claim about Freud’s supposed retrac-
tion is wrong on both counts: Freud never denied the extent of
child sexual abuse either publicly or privately, nor was it failure
of moral courage in any shape or form. Basher Masson caught a
carp of truth with a bait of falsehood in that he sparked the
debate on the seduction theory in our time. The orthodox be-
lievers, on the other hand, oversold Freud’s theory of sexuality
and the Oedipus complex in their zeal to replace one universal
formula by another. Freud appropriately mitigated his earlier er-
ror of attributing universality to seduction as cause of neurosis;
the etiological role of seduction per se stood the test of time,
but the correction of the original error neither materially nor
logically required the theory of infantile sexuality as a replace-
ment, for seduction as cause and infantile sexuality as cause
stand or fall singly and together (Freud, 1896c). It should be
of interest to revisit seduction in relation to Freud’s theory of
sexuality.
TRAUMA OF REALITY, TRAUMA OF SEXUALITY
Like the proverbial horse and carriage, sex and seduction go to-
gether: to seduce means to induce another person to engage in
sex voluntarily, with or without parity in age, gender, maturity,
or power between the participants. At a further remove seduc-
tion implies a cunning seducer or seductress and a gullible sucker.
Sexual participation obtained by the use of force is no seduction
at all: The victim is prey of rape or any other form of abuse.
Many a discussion on seduction in the professional literature
and the press has been marred by the confusion of seduction as
consensual sexual arousal and surrender and seduction as sadis-
tic sexual abuse, or sexual trauma. But even consensual seduc-
tion may turn out to be traumatic; it depends on the situation.
In addition, seduction need not be sexual: It can be psychologi-
cal, as when the sucker is seduced to buy the Brooklyn Bridge,
or spiritual, as the seduction of the German masses by Hitler
(Lothane, 1997a). The connection between sexuality, seduction,
and trauma calls for reconsideration of the concept of trauma
in Freud.
The Greek word trauma, used in English for centuries in its
literal meaning of an external wound to the body, was toward
the end of the nineteenth century extended figuratively to psy-
chic trauma, to mean a psychological wound, shock, or stressor,
capable of precipitating a psychological reaction that took the
form of a disorder marked by anxiety, depression, exhaustion or
neurasthenia, or somatization. A concept related to trauma was
noxa, that is, an agent capable of causing damage or injury. In
addition, it became common usage, as with stress, to apply trauma
both to the precipitating stimulus and to the emotional reaction
it caused (Freud, 1895).
Freud learned important lessons about trauma and sexuality
from his teachers Josef Breuer (1842–1925) in Vienna and Jean-
Martin Charcot (1825–1893) in Paris. Between 1880 and 1882
Breuer treated the young Anna O for a syndrome of anxiety,
somatization, phobias, and hallucinations that developed in re-
sponse to “psychic trauma”: at first, the trauma of the severe
illness of her father to whom she ministered daily, and later, as
700 ZVI LOTHANE
a result, “the most severe psychic trauma” (S.E., 2:26) following

his death. Breuer was impressed that “the element of sexuality
was astonishingly undeveloped in her” (S.E., 2:21). Freud would
later claim that Breuer was blind to sexual factors, which is con-
tradicted by a number of references to sexuality by Breuer (1895).
However, while Freud knew about Anna O as early as 1883, I
believe the full significance of her case came to him only after
his apprenticeship with Charcot in Paris in 1885.
The influence of the great Charcot—anatomist, psycholo-
gist, and visionary—enabled Freud’s transition from neurology
to psychology. Charcot’s most important contribution to the fu-
ture of psychoanalysis was in rehabilitating a disease, hysteria,
and a treatment method, hypnosis. Later the exposure to the
Nancy School taught Freud the importance of yet another
method, suggestion. It is from Charcot that Freud took the con-
cept of traumatic hysteria, that is, a person’s emotional reaction
to trauma: a combination of a literal, physical wound, as in a
vehicular accident, and a metaphorical wound, as in psychical
shock. Traumatic hysteria, meaning a painful life event and its
associated painful affect, is a common experience of people ev-
erywhere. No psychoanalytic or therapeutic method can make
do without the concept of trauma and the reaction to trauma,
and no clinical practice of psychiatry, psychology, medicine, or
psychoanalysis can ever exist without it.
Upon his return to Vienna in 1886 Freud started a private
practice, treating patients with a variety of functional (which he
called “hysterical”) symptoms; six years later (Freud, 1892–1893)
published his first report of a successful hypnotic-suggestive
treatment of a hysterical woman. By 1893 he prevailed upon a
reluctant Breuer to publish their joint manifesto, On the Psychical
Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication,
and in 1895 appeared the seminal Studies on Hysteria, the birth-
place of psychoanalysis and Freud’s transition from Breuer’s
trauma theory and the cathartic method of treatment to Freud’s
new trauma theory and the psychoanalytic method of treatment
(Lothane, 1995). By 1900 Freud completed the delineation of
his psychoanalytic method by expanding the original symptoms
analysis into dream analysis, in his second epoch-making book,
The Interpretation of Dreams.
In their quest of a new healing method, Breuer and Freud

(1893) found that
external events determined the pathology of hysteria . . . [so] ob-

vious in cases of traumatic hysteria[;] . . . [thus] the most various
symptoms . . . are . . . strictly related to precipitating trauma. . . . [There
was an] analogy between the pathogenesis of hysteria and that of trau-
matic neuroses [where what counts] was not the trifling physical
injury but the affect of fright, the psychic trauma. . . . [Since] for
many, if not most, hysterical symptoms . . . traumas . . . have only
been able to exercise their traumatic effect by summation . . . as
components in a single story of suffering, [such that] an appar-
ently trivial circumstance . . . attains the dignity of trauma.
(Breuer & Freud, 1893, pp. 4–6)
But trauma, like anything else that happens, is preserved in

memory. Therefore the momentous and memorable conclusion
was that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.
It is impressive how clearly Breuer and Freud (1893) saw
the complexities of the traumatic situation as a whole: It was not
a simple matter of stimulus and reaction but the summation of
perception, fantasy, and emotion, of the psychic trauma inher-
ent in the “precipitating event” and in the emotional reaction of
the sufferer, due to the “susceptibility of the person affected” (p.
6)—in short, the counterpoint of reality and fantasy, the ob-
served surface and the hidden depth of the person in the situa-
tion. It was clear from the outset that the new therapy was based
on a historical investigation of the manifest and the latent con-
tent of the symptom and thus included the traumatic event and
the complex emotional response to it, that is, the interplay of
memory, meaning, language, symbolization, and dreaming—so
much is already present in the Preliminary Communication. In the
chapter on the therapy of hysteria Freud expounded on the im-
portance of love and sympathy and introduced a new method-
ological concept: transference.
In a landmark paper, Freud (1895) named and described a
new disorder, anxiety neurosis, caused by a variety of “noxae
[from Latin noxa, “injury,” “damage”] and influences from sexual
life . . . operative as aetiological factors” (p. 99). This disorder
was conceived as a physiological neurosis, the term neurosis
here indicating a “status nervosus,” that is, a condition of dysreg-
702 ZVI LOTHANE
ulation in the nervous system, in which the pathogenic process

was produced by an “absolute or relative accumulation of excita-
tion” (p. 92, emphasis in original), the latter due to a lack of
a sexual outlet and the much-needed discharge of dammed-up
“libido” (p. 102); the condition as a whole evoked in his mind a
comparison with a state of intoxication. Freud also called such a
disorder an Aktual-Neurose, the adjective aktual meaning present-
day, contemporary—a disorder stemming from a current frustra-
tion of sexual performance and curable by a removal of the ob-
stacle and a resumption of normal sexual activity. The other
aktual neurosis was neurasthenia, caused by a depletion of sex-
ual substances, for example, as a result of excessive masturba-
tion, leading to a syndrome of fatigue and listlessness. There is
a further implication embedded in these considerations made in
later writings (Freud, 1917), that was of relevance to traumas of
all kinds: trauma as disorder of homeostasis contributing to a
fixation on the trauma and to developmental arrest. Freud
(1917) commented, “Indeed, the term ‘traumatic’ has no other
sense than the economic [i.e., energetic] one. We apply it to an
experience which within a short time presents the mind with an
increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off
in the normal way, and it must result in a permanent disturbance
of the manner in which energy operates. This analogy is bound
to tempt us to describe as traumatic those experiences too to
which our neurotic patients seem to be fixated and this indeed
was actually the first formula in which (in 1893 and 1895) Breuer
and I accounted theoretically for our new observations” (p. 275,
emphasis added). When he revisited the traumatic neuroses of
war, Freud (1920) added the concept of the “stimulus barrier,”
ensuring “protection against stimuli” (p. 27, emphasis in original),
and as “traumatic any excitations from outside that are powerful
enough to break through the protective shield” (p. 29). The cure
here was an effort “to master the stimulus retrospectively” (p.
32). These dynamic ideas of Freud underlie the currently estab-
lished diagnoses of acute stress disorder and acute posttraumatic
stress disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). The
idea of fixation is fundamental to the concept of developmental
arrests.
The inhibition of sexuality was caused differently in the psy-
choneuroses: here sexuality was inhibited due to the deferred ef-

fect of traumatic experiences that occurred in the remote past:
when the psychical traumas from which the hysterical symptoms

were derived were pursued further and further by means of the
cathartic procedure initiated by Breuer and me, experiences were
eventually reached which belonged to the patient’s childhood and
related to their sexual life. And this was so, even in cases . . .
[caused] by a commonplace emotion of a nonsexual kind. Unless
these sexual traumas of childhood were taken into account it was
impossible either to elucidate the symptom . . . or to prevent their
recurrence. In this way the unique significance of sexual experi-
ences in the aetiology of the psychoneuroses seemed to be estab-
lished beyond doubt. (Freud, 1906, p. 273, emphasis added)
It now became necessary to align trauma with the psycho-

logical inhibition of sexuality in the psychoneuroses and to ex-
plain the latter as a developmental process. Early on, says Freud
(1906), he was impressed by a “disproportionately large number
of sexual seductions by an adult or by older children [which he]
overestimated (though in other respects they were not open
to doubt),” but now he realized that “infantile sexual activity
(whether spontaneous or provoked) prescribes the direction that will
be taken by later sexual life after maturity” (p. 274, emphasis
added). The “sexual impressions” of childhood, whether “trau-
matic” or “trivial,” after an incubation period during which they
remained unconscious, returned during “the years of puberty”
as deferred “after-effects,” that is, as “direct derivatives of the
repressed memories of childhood experiences,” such that now
the hysterical “phantasies,” or other “imaginary creations,” were
“on the one side built up out of and over the childhood memo-
ries and on the other side were transformed directly into the
symptoms” (p. 274). This observation led Freud to consolidate a
thesis already in place: “The patient’s symptoms constitute his sexual
activity (whether wholly or in part). . . . Anyone who knows how
to interpret the language of hysteria will recognize that the neuro-
sis is concerned only with the patient’s repressed sexuality” (p.
278, second emphasis added).
The statement that hysteria is a language, which it surely is,
marks a methodological fork on the road: The function of lan-
guage and communication is in the realm of the method, the
704 ZVI LOTHANE
privileged causal role of sexuality in health and disease is a mat-

ter of theory. Thus, the tension caused by the ebb and flow of
the energy of sexual drives is a biological condition, leading to a
dysregulation of homeostasis and thus a state of internal tension,
or trauma, pressing for discharge; and the sexual drives are then
embodied in a communication of lust or love, an act of speech
addressed by one person to another, in the flesh or in absentia,
a confluence of current desires and past dreams and desires.
Therefore, the appropriate treatment for the psychoneuroses was
psychoanalysis, the historical unraveling of the conscious and un-
conscious structures of dream and desire and of the dramas of
love. Whereas, according to Strachey and others, in the 1905
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and the 1906 paper Freud
was officially abandoning the seduction theory, in actuality, even
as he was engaged in a paradigm shift, he was validating seduc-
tion as a real sexual experience, as an actual historical event with
its blend of trauma, experienced or fantasied, that could re-
emerge as the transformed return of the repressed.
Mark well: These were not just three essays on sexuality, for
if it were so, Freud would have been just another sexologist, that
is, a doctor of sexual disorders, like the many whose work he
cited in the Three Essays: Bloch, Eulenburg, Moll, Näcke and oth-
ers who vanished into the dustbin of history. No, these were es-
says on a new theory of sexuality, and the difference it made, to
wit: it was a new universal etiological theory, half-physiological
and half-psychological, but mediated by language. Just like physi-
cal energy capable of passing from one form into another, so
the sexual energy, or libido, was capable of being transformed
into neurotic and psychotic symptoms and perversions, and as a
prime mover in health and disease, it was also the driving force
of transference and cure.
A further corollary, Freud held, was that sexuality was also
the driving force of (1) unconscious wishful fantasies, and (2)
the specifically incestuous, euphemistically renamed oedipal,
wishes of that famed Oedipus complex. But even if there is such
unprovoked, endogenous unconscious fantasy activity arising de
novo, in itself a hypothetical construct, it does not negate the
role of real experiences originating in the environment. As a re-
sult of this new emphasis, a spurious dichotomy and opposition
was created between outer environment and inner environment,

exogenous trauma and endogenous trauma, between perception
and imagination, impression and impulse, the external press of
deeds and the internal press of needs, between biological con-
structs and historical processes (Lothane, 1983b, 1987a). But
Freud, I submit, was an idealist in theory and a realist in life: He
never denied the counterpoint of inner and outer reality, of real
incestuous fondling of the child by the parent and equally true
wishful fantasies to be fondled, of “external sexual seduction ver-
sus internal sexual tension, . . . It was a matter of the proper pro-
portion between these two complementary realms, a matter of
emphasis, not a repudiation” (Lothane, 1987a, p. 91).
Spontaneous drives and unconscious fantasies are another
way of restating innate dispositions and potentialities that be-
come actualities: infantile masturbation and incestuous acts and
wishes become facts with causal power when they are discovered
in the life story of a real person; they are fictions when they are
treated as universal causes applicable to everyone, that is, to an
ideal person or a statistical sample. The conclusion should have
been that children are not invariably polymorphously perverse
but rather polymorphously pervertible in the course of actual
life experiences. The apparent gain in scientific parsimony in
positing sexual drives and unconscious fantasies should be miti-
gated by a perspective based in realism, existence, and historic-
ity. As Charcot put it and Freud quoted it, “La théorie c’est bon,
mais ça n’empeche d’exister,” theory is great, but real life exists,
too. In real life we see an infinite variability of innate disposition
and actual expression among persons in situations, in reciprocal
exchanges of love and lust. The other two facts Freud over-
looked was the dyadic nature of the sexual love itself (Lothane,
1992a) and the filial, tender, nonsexual nature of the child’s love
for the parent, the latter based on the need to survive, to love,
and to be loved in return.
The mistake that haunted Freud in the seduction theory, its
spurious universality, came back to haunt him in his universal
application of the sexual theory far in excess of its warrant. Like
the misplaced seduction theory before, the overly ambitious and
narrow sexual theory of the neuroses, “to put it bluntly, . . .
broke down under the weight of its own improbability and con-
706 ZVI LOTHANE
tradiction in definitely ascertainable circumstances” (Freud,

1914, p. 17). Moreover, the vast field of depression, and the dy-
namic role of loss and aggression in depressive states, was yet to
come.
There was an important sociological corollary to the theory
of a wholly endogenous, that is, unprovoked, infantile sexuality:
It exonerated the parents from having aroused that sexuality,
and to this Ferenczi objected vigorously. The blind spot is al-
ready in evidence in Freud’s treatment of the Oedipus, or incest,
complex: Just as the myth starts with the hubris of the father’s
deadly aggression against the son, not the son’s aggression to-
ward father, for which Laios later pays with his life at the hands
of Oedipus (further mythological examples being the unconsum-
mated sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham and the consummated cru-
cifixion of Jesus as ordained by the Heavenly Father), so the in-
cestuous desires of the child toward the parent were often
aroused by parental manipulation. Freud (1933a) would later say
that this happens especially in the case of mothers ministering
to the hygiene of their daughters’ genitals, but, of course, boys
could be similarly manipulated.
SEDUCTION AND TRAUMA: A RECANTATION THAT NEVER WAS
The most famous instance of the alleged recantation was a letter

Freud wrote to his friend Fliess on September 21, 1897, first
published in 1950 (p. 259), in which Freud said: “I no longer
believe in my neurotica,” i.e., that a memory of actual seduction is
the cause of every case of hysteria.” In spite of the overwhelming
evidence to the contrary from Freud’s published works, the let-
ter became an article of faith, a fetish, for those who adhered to
the official story, instead of being treated as just a phase, con-
fused and confusing, in the evolution of Freud’s thinking about
trauma, memory, and fantasy. Here are Freud’s reasons for his
change of mind:
[1] the continual disappointments to bring an analysis [instead of
the erroneous “my analysis,” Standard Edition, 1:259] to a close
. . . [2] that in every case the father, not excluding my own, had
to be blamed as a pervert . . . after all, not very probable . . . [3]
thirdly, the certain discovery that there are no indications of real-
ity in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth

and fiction that is cathected with affect . . . [4] It seems to have be-
come once again arguable that it is only later experiences that
give the impetus to phantasies, which then hark back to child-
hood. (Freud, 1950, p. 259–260, emphasis added)
Points 1 and 2: The nugget of a genuine discovery by Masson

as reported by Blumenthal in 1981, the mistake in transcribing
a key word in Freud’s letter, was lost in the tumult: realization
that the seduction formula was unable to bring even one (“eine”)
analysis of a patient to a successful conclusion, let alone explain
all cases. In addition, the formula was not universally valid, at
least, not in the case of his own father. Freud also was becoming
increasingly aware that the cathartic method, while successful in
removing symptoms of hysteria, was not sufficient as a causal
treatment for the disorder as a whole. A major transformation
was blowing in the wind: replacing Breuer’s cathartic method
with the psychoanalytic method proper, free association, and as
aided by the analysis of resistance and transference. Rather than
relying on seduction as a universal decoding key or formula,
such as an etiology in medical disorders, the factors of resistance
or transference would now explain negative therapeutic results.
But then even in medicine the knowledge of the cause and
knowing the proper causal treatment is no guarantee of success.
Points 3 and 4. It may not always be easy to tell fact from
fabrication, veridical memory from delusive memory, because
memory is often fallible, and memory can be falsified retrospec-
tively, but all this should be no cause for nihilism. It is quite
different to explain such failures by a metaphysical hypothesis of
a black box called “the unconscious,” an extra-empirical “region”
in which memories can never be told from fantasies. Nor is this
problem solved by positing additional extra-empirical entities
such as “primal fantasies” and “unconscious fantasies.” In states
of sleep, intoxication, or psychosis, we may confuse perception
and hallucination, but in our waking life we have motility and
other ways to test reality and to distinguish perception, memory,
and fantasy. Besides, dreams and hallucinations, even as they are
influenced by unconscious processes, are recalled because they
become conscious experiences, or else they would remain un-
known forever. When they become conscious, they can be fur-
708 ZVI LOTHANE
ther understood, or analyzed, as having been set in motion in

the first place to soothe the pain of psychic trauma. Nay, their
very wishful nature is because the wish is engendered by such
psychic pain. Dreams, hallucinations, and delusions, as Freud
showed, were composite compromise formations constructed
from perception, imagination, and emotion to embellish the
past, present, or future trauma. It all goes to show that in our
changing nocturnal and diurnal moods we oscillate between
dream and reality, hallucination and perception, childhood de-
lights and thrills and adult duties.
The dialectics of perception, memory, and imagination, of
sexuality experienced in act and in fantasy, of retrospective fan-
tasies that hark back to childhood—all these in relation to scenes
of actual and imagined seduction—play an important role in the
story of the famed Wolf Man, alias Sergei Pankeieff, as retold in
From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (Freud, 1918). The Wolf
Man began his analysis with Freud in 1910, the same year Freud
was reading Schreber’s book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and
writing about it. When discussing the Wolf Man’s attitude to
God, Freud would equate it with Schreber’s (p. 84), although the
cases are rather dissimilar.
The story of the Wolf Man was written up in 1914, after the
secession of Adler and the breakup with Jung and the ongoing
polemics between them and Freud as the defender of orthodoxy
against heresy (Freud, 1914d). The debates centered around the
role of libido and infantile sexuality in the causation of neurosis.
The relevant Chapter III in that History is tellingly titled “The
Seduction and Its Immediate Consequences,” clear evidence that
the clinical concept of seduction was alive and well. The seduc-
tion episode was a centerpiece in the analysis of the many deter-
minants of the Wolf Man’s childhood neurosis—external events,
internal sexual drives, genuine memory, and retrospective phan-
tasy—as well as in the development of the Wolf Man’s infantile,
adolescent, and adult sexual persona.
At issue was solving the riddle of the Wolf Man’s anxiety
hysteria, in the shape of a wolf phobia, that erupted at age four
with the dream of the white wolves. Freud connected that dream
to a reconstruction of the Wolf Man’s earliest traumatic experi-
ence at age “121 years old: observation of his parents copulating;
or observation of them when they were together, into which he

later introduced a phantasy of them copulating” (Freud, 1918,
p. 121). Was this, then, a genuine recollection of the primal
scene or a retrospective phantasy created by later events and
conflicts? Freud inferred that the recollected scene was specifi-
cally of the father engaged with his mother in coitus from be-
hind and that the Wolf Man’s phobia of wolves at age four
erupted due to the boy’s “ ‘longing for [the same] sexual satisfac-
tion from his father—realization that castration is a necessary
condition for it—fear of his father’ ” (p. 42), such that the sexual
wish for the wolf = father was converted into a fear of the wolf.
However, the wolf phobia was also a sequel to a more recent
trauma, caused by an actual seduction.
The Wolf Man also recalled that when he was 341 years old
“his sister had seduced him into sexual practices. First came the
recollection that in the lavatory . . . she had made this proposal:
‘Let us show our bottoms,’ and had proceeded from words to
deeds” (Freud, 1918, p. 20). On another occasion “his sister had
taken hold of his penis and played with it, at the same time tell-
ing him . . . his Nanya [nanny] . . . used to do the same thing
with all kinds of people” (p. 20). Prior to these recollections the
Wolf Man told Freud dreams in which he tried to undress his
sister. In this connection Freud explains how “psychical truth,”
dubbed “retrospective phantasying” (Zurückphantasieren), is used
to aggrandize historical truth: “Here was the explanation of the
phantasies. . . . They were meant to efface the memory of an
event which later on seemed offensive to the patient’s masculine
self-esteem and they reached this end by putting an imaginary
and desirable converse in the place of the historical truth. . . .
These phantasies, therefore, corresponded exactly to the leg-
ends by means of which a nation that has become great and
proud tries to conceal the insignificance and failure of its begin-
nings” (Freud, 1918, p. 20). Subsequently the Wolf Man turned
his fantasies towards his nanny and “began to play with his penis
in his Nanya’s [nanny’s] presence, . . . and this must be regarded
as an attempt at seduction. His Nanya disillusioned him; she
made a serious face and explained to him that that wasn’t good;
children who did that, she added, get a ‘wound’ in the place”
(p. 24).
710 ZVI LOTHANE
The Wolf Man’s “seduction by his sister was certainly not a

phantasy” (p. 21), says Freud, and goes on to analyze its far-
reaching effects on the man’s sadomasochistic character and sex-
uality: “It looks as though his seduction by his sister has forced
him into a passive role and had given him a passive sexual aim.
Under the persisting influence of this experience he pursued a
path from his sister via his Nanya to his father—from a passive
attitude towards women to the same attitude towards men” (p.
27). Freud concludes: “the sexual development of the case was
. . . first decisively influenced by the seduction, and was then di-
verted by the scene of observation of the coitus, which in its
deferred action operated like a second seduction” (p. 47), even
though it was historically the first. In keeping with his idea about
the after-effects of early trauma, Freud remarks how the Wolf
Man’s watching sheep and sheepdogs copulating led him to a
“deferred understanding of [these] impressions” by means of a
“transference from the copulating dogs on to his parents not by
making an inference accompanied by words but by his searching
out in his memory a real scene in which his parents were to-
gether and which could be combined with the situation of copu-
lation” (p. 58), again stressing the ongoing complementarity of
perception and imagination.
In this History Freud resolves the difficulties concerning true
and false remembering that so troubled him in his communica-
tion to Fliess in 1897, even though the test of final proof eludes
him. On the one hand, says Freud, “scenes from early infancy
are not reproductions of real occurrences . . . [but are] rather
products of the imagination, which find their instigation in ma-
ture life, which are intended to serve as some kind of symbolic
representation of real wishes and interests, and which owe their
origin to a regressive tendency, to a turning away from the tasks
of reality” (p. 49). However, bringing them to the light of con-
sciousness is an indispensable task, for only “after the infantile
phantasies had been disposed of in this way, it would be possible
to begin a second portion of the treatment, which would be con-
cerned with the patient’s real life. . . . A correct procedure,
therefore, would make no alteration in the technique of analysis,
whatever estimate might be formed of these scenes from in-
fancy” (p. 50). These scenes, being “regressive phantasies . . . are
the products of construction” (pp. 50–51). Now Freud reaches a

unified view of historical and psychic, that is, constructed, re-
ality:
it does not necessarily follow that these previously unconscious

recollections are always true. They may be; but they are often
distorted and interspersed with imaginary elements, just like the
so-called screen memories which are presented spontaneously.
. . . These have to be divined—constructed—gradually and labori-
ously from an aggregate of indications.* . . . I am not of the opin-
ion, however, that such scenes must necessarily be phantasies be-
cause they do not appear in the shape of recollections. It seems
to me absolutely equivalent to a recollection, if the memories are
replaced (as in the present case) by dreams the analysis of which
invariably leads back to the same scene and which reproduces
every portion of its content in an inexhaustible variety of new
shapes. Indeed dreaming is another kind of remembering. . . .
*[added in Freud’s own footnote:] . . . A passage from the
first edition of my Interpretation of Dreams will show . . . I had ex-
plained to my patient that the earliest experiences of childhood
were “not obtainable any longer as such” but were replaced in analy-
sis by “transferences” and dreams. (Freud, 1918, p. 51; emphasis
in original)
The idea that dreaming is a valid historical record and a

way of remembering is worth emphasizing and comparing with
Freud’s other, much better known law, that dreams are wish ful-
fillments. The latter formula has forever obscured the former
insight, as well as the understanding that the dream is a wish-
fulfilling reaction to painful day residues, or, reality (Lothane,
1983b).
Freud’s crucial, emphatic conclusion in his debate with Jung
and other opponents was that they “rejected as false precisely
what is new in psycho-analysis and peculiar to it” (p. 53), namely,
that the “neurosis of later life was preceded by a neurosis in
early childhood,” and that childhood “plays a decisive part in deter-
mining whether and at what point the individual shall fail to master
the real problems of life” (p. 54, emphasis in original). In this he
was right. But he may have conceded that he had shortchanged
the Wolf Man in two areas: He focused on his childhood and
very little, if at all, on the “diversion of libido from current [i.e.,
adult] conflicts” (footnote, p. 55, emphasis in original) and the
712 ZVI LOTHANE
real problems of life, and he erred in his assumption that in

children “we discover nothing but instinctual impulses” (p. 55).
In keeping with his usual rhetorical stratagem of preemp-
tively disarming imaginary opponents, Freud seems to be ad-
dressing some very modern rebuttals in connection with the evi-
dentiary value of dreams: “in dreams . . . the patients gradually
acquire a profound conviction of the reality of these primal
scenes, a conviction that is no respect inferior to one based on
recollection” (p. 51). He continues: “It is well known that dreams
can be guided. [In his own footnote Freud adds:] (The mechanism
of dreaming cannot be influenced; but dream material is to some
extent subject to orders.)” (p. 52). In this he anticipates his fu-
ture critics of psychoanalysis, for example, Adolf Grünbaum,
who will claim, says Freud presciently, that “the sense of convic-
tion felt by the person analysed may be the result of suggestion
. . . the psychoanalyst . . . suggests to him that when he was a
child he had some experience or other, which he must now re-
collect in order to be cured,” that not only were these “not reali-
ties but phantasies,” but actually “they are phantasies not of the
patient but of the analyst himself, who forces them upon the
person under analysis on account of some complexes of his
own” (p. 52). Freud appeals to the adversaries to experience an
analysis in order to be convinced, while resigned to the fact that,
in the end, the analysts will be charged with “subtle self-decep-
tion . . . [and] obtuseness of judgment; it will be impossible to
arrive at a decision” (p. 53). Quod erat demonstrandum.
An interesting epilogue to the Wolf Man’s story was sup-
plied by Masson (1984): Masson found unpublished notes of
Ruth Mac Brunswick, the American psychoanalyst who reana-
lyzed the patient at Freud’s request, according to which “the
child had been anally seduced by a member of his family” (p.
xix). Robert Fliess would have felt vindicated. Freud’s own epi-
logue is in his psychoanalytic testament, composed in England,
the promised land he reached fleeing from Hitler:
It seems that neuroses are acquired only in early childhood. . . .
The neuroses are, as we know, disorders of the ego; and it is not
to be wondered at if the ego, so long as it is feeble, immature and
incapable of resistance, fails to deal with tasks which it could cope
with later on with the utmost ease. In these circumstances instinc-
tual demands from within, no less than excitations from the ex-
ternal world, operate as “traumas,” particularly if they are met
halfway by certain innate dispositions. . . . Our attention is first
attracted by the effects of certain influences which do not apply
to all children, though they are common enough—such as the
sexual abuse of children by adults, their seduction by other chil-
dren (brothers and sisters) slightly their seniors, and . . . their
being deeply stirred by seeing or hearing at first hand sexual be-
havior between adults . . . such experiences arouse a child’s sus-
ceptibility and force his own sexual urges into certain channels
from which they cannot afterwards depart. Since these impres-
sions are subjected to repression, either at once or as soon as they
seek to return as memories, they constitute the determinant for
the neurotic compulsion. . . . (Freud, 1940, pp. 184–185, p. 187)
Freud completed the arc he began half a lifetime earlier, in the

decade of 1886–1896, once again reconciling what were only ap-
parent opposites. The troubled and misunderstood 1897 letter
of recantation is invalidated both by the weight of the historical
record and the daily clinical experiences in the practice of all
varieties of psychotherapy.
CONCLUSION: FREUD BASHERS THEN AND NOW
A close rereading of Freud shows that the notion, still voiced

by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, that Freud abandoned the
seduction theory, meaning external trauma, is wrong. Equally
wrong was Masson to make the same claim, as was his charge
that Freud first acknowledged and then repudiated the reality of
abuse, assault, and trauma. These were tragic misunderstand-
ings, as was the rise and fall of Jeffrey Masson and the moving
story of his victimization. What went wrong? The causes of the
tragedy fall into two categories: political and philosophical.
First, the political. The social narrative presented here is a
testimony to the influence of external conflicts of vested inter-
ests and the internal conflicts of passionate emotions, or of poli-
tics and transference, love and hatred, orthodoxy and heresy,
upon matters and methods of science. Coming into organized
psychoanalysis from the university, where freedom of opinion
and speech was stifled less than in medical schools, teaching hos-
pitals, and their offshoots, the medical analytic societies, Mas-
714 ZVI LOTHANE
son’s passionate advocacy was seen as psychopathic arrogance.

And yet, in spite of the defects in scholarship, Masson had both
an important message and lots of charisma to create a sensation.
Organized psychoanalysis, at the sunset of an era during which
it acted like an almighty Vatican anointing kings in psychiatric
academia, overreacted emotionally, rather than with a view to
understanding the philosophical issues involved. Even if only a
fraction in the epilogue to The Assault on Truth (Masson, 1990)
is true, it exemplifies the abuses suffered by many candidates in
analytic training and the vindictive avengers it has spawned; and
it makes Masson’s rage understandable. Since then, the shifting
demographic scene and the changing culture and economics
have combined to mellow psychoanalytic politics into a more
user-friendly mode.
Second, the philosophical. Against Freud’s perennial contri-
bution to the understanding of human nature, nurture, and con-
duct, stand the changing fashions in theorizing and the unre-
solved confusion between method and theory. The problem
started with Freud himself and is still ongoing (Lothane, 1994b,
1996c, 1996d, 1999a). It is manifest in the proliferation of theo-
rists and schools of psychoanalysis, and it blinded Masson and
his critics on their tragic collision course. Roughly, methods deal
with observation, description, and doing in the realm of the real,
and theories with generalization, abstraction, and speculation in
the realm of the ideal; both are needed, and both have a role to
play in such disciplines as medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanaly-
sis, all dealing with the biological and psychological nature of
men and women in society.
Down the decades Freud’s followers have been polarized
into the orthodox (form the Greek combination: orthos, right,
and doxa, opinion) and the revisionists, the believers and the her-
etics, the latter viewed by the former as deviant doubters. The
notion of orthodoxy is usually applied to adherents of religions
or cults (Lothane, 1983a). There are no orthodox physicists: his-
torically, upholders of the particle theory of matter are no more
orthodox than those of the wave theory. Are orthodox psychoan-
alysts today still defined by their belief in the libido theory?
Whose is the true theory in psychoanalysis: Bion’s, Brenner’s
Kohut’s, Winnicott’s, or Lacan’s? Against the transience and
changeability of etiology and ideology, and especially against ei-

ther/or habit of thinking, stands the permanence of method.
The either/or thinking about doing and dreaming, external and
internal trauma, biology and psychology tend to polarize people
into worshippers of jealous gods and to generate wars of ideol-
ogy. In the process truths and people suffer, in vain. Further-
more, when psychiatrists and psychoanalysts aspire to write text-
books, they follow the scientific method of subsumption. When
methods are employed study the person, to arrive at a true story
of a person’s examined life, psychiatry and psychoanalysis must
follow the historical method of individuation.
Masson’s assault on Freud at its bluntest, whether on or off
target, was genteel compared to what has been pouring out from
the recent crop of Freud bashers: An idealistic Masson wanted
to play guru and reform psychoanalysis; the current Freud bash-
ers want to remove it from the face of the earth. An example of
the latter is Professor of English Frederick Crews, once a candi-
date at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and Freud ad-
herent who turned into a most virulent of Freud attackers
(Crews, 1993, 1994a, 1994b, 1995). Like Masson before him, by
dint of rhetoric and a style marked by distortion and exaggera-
tion, Crews gained instant notoriety in the popular press, for
example, Time magazine, which ran a cover story in November
1993 titled “Is Freud Dead?” With powerful penmanship Crews
panned all of psychoanalysis—as method of treatment, body of
knowledge and theory, and tool of research—as fraudulent and
socially dangerous pseudoscience. Freud is certainly not above
criticism, but a global attack like that of Crews is bound to pro-
duce more heat than light and its own brand of fanaticism. Here
I shall only discuss some of his arguments regarding the seduc-
tion theory.
While Masson attacked Freud for his alleged abandonment
of the seduction theory and the victims of sexual abuse, Crews
has it both ways: Freud is faulted for retracting the seduction
theory in 1897 and for having “publicly reaffirmed it a year
later,” evidence of how “earlier acts of fakery and equivocation
were compounded by fresh ones” (Crews, 1993, p. 62). Freud’s
most egregious fakery, claims Crews, was to invent the theory
that people use repression to forget anxiety-producing memo-
716 ZVI LOTHANE
ries of trauma, such as parental sexual abuse. Such “incorrect

and widely dispersed ideas about the mind inevitably end by
causing social damage. . . . By virtue of his prodding, both before
and after he devised psychoanalysis, to get his patients to ‘recall’
nonexistent sexual events, Freud is the true historical sponsor
of ‘false memory syndrome’” (p. 66). For a man who quotes so
carefully, Crews certainly missed this caveat expressed by Freud
himself: “One must beware of forcing on patients supposed rem-
iniscences of this kind by questioning them, or of believing in
the romances which they themselves invent. . . . no one should
form too certain judgments in this obscure field until he has
made use of the only method which can throw light on it—of
psycho-analysis for the purpose of making conscious what has so
far been unconscious” (Freud, 1896b, p. 164). This, however,
does not deter Crews from averring that “the tradition of Freud-
ian theory and practice unmistakably lies behind their tragic de-
ception of both parents and jurors” (Crews, 1993, p. 65), as de-
tailed in subsequent reportage (Crews, 1994a, 1994b), and the
replies to his critics (Crews, 1995).
But it is as logical and as ethical to blame Freud for the
excesses of the memory recovery movement as it is to blame
Jesus Christ for the Spanish inquisition, or Moritz Schreber for
the rise of Hitler (Lothane, 1996a). Crew’s attacks came at a time
when the advocacy of the abused took an ominous turn: the ac-
cused abusers themselves became victims of abuse in the being
falsely accused in child molestation trials that came to resemble
witch-hunts by the Holy Inquisition and the trials in Salem, mi-
nus the thumbscrews and the rack. As the advocates of Recov-
ered Memory Movement have increasingly come under attack by
the sponsors of the False Memory Movement, it became abun-
dantly clear that that many true child abusers went unpunished
and many falsely accused people suffered trauma, disruption,
and pain. Nobody would disagree that injustice in any place, at
any time, and in any form should be exposed and deplored. How-
ever, the sinister connection forged between child abuse, litigation,
and vested interests of various persons and groups has little to do
with the legitimate pursuits of the professions of psychiatry and
psychoanalysis, and the art of psychotherapy as a whole.
Psychoanalysis as a method of study and therapy of individ-
ual lives of real persons must remain historical and ethical in

its method; psychoanalysis as science, in the sense of rigorous
observation of phenomena and rigorous thinking, must seek the
laws of the mind and insist on methods adequate to the phenom-
ena it studies, while treating theories as metaphysical aids to
thinking. Otherwise it can easily fall into the pitfall of reifying
and deifying its theories as doctrines and dogmas, turning etiol-
ogy into a doctrinaire“-ism” or a “pan” (a Greek word meaning
“all-inclusive”) ideology. In the 1920s Freud would justifiably de-
fend himself against the charge of “pansexualism,” the ideology
that everything is sex. Of all the basic life facts Freud philoso-
phized about, such as language and meaning, symbolism and
dreams, and unconscious motives of conscious acts, none has
disturbed the sleep of mankind as much as his writings about
sex, or lust and love. Indeed, Freudism came to be equated with
sexism, that sex causes everything. But opening such matters for
inquiry hardly justifies Torrey’s (1992; reviewed by Goldsmith,
1993) strident accusation that Freud’s sex theories had the malig-
nant effect of destroying the sexual morality of the American
people. In a positive way, Freud’s sexual theories have been an
implicit ethical defense of the right to sexual happiness and tol-
erance for the varieties of sexual expression and orientation.
Third, the ethical. Because psychoanalysis is where society
is, its method and theories are also bound with ethics and ethical
norms. Science deals with what is and ethics deals with what
ought to be, providing the moral compass for responsible behav-
ior in society and in the psychotherapeutic situation. Psychiatry
and psychoanalysis stand or fall with the moral impact they have
on individual lives and behavior in society. If they are to be con-
ceived as sciences, then what is their proper scientific paradigm?
Because they deal with the individual, that which is not further
divisible into the parts studied by specialized sciences such as
physiology or pharmacology, they cannot solely rely on the
methods of the specialized basic sciences. The person is still the
most unsatisfactory scientific object and yet the most challeng-
ing, and it is the person, with his or her body, mind, soul, and
spirit, living in relation to other persons, that remains the proper
study of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Above all, the greatest
challenge to psychoanalysis is to help our understanding of love
718 ZVI LOTHANE
relations, both tender and erotic, and it is love and compassion

that are still the greatest unresolved challenge for science and
the art of healing in medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.
NOTES
1. A number of inaccuracies in Malcolm (1984) concerning Schreber call for
correction: (1) in Part I, chapter 8 and (2) Part II, chapter 2. (1) I have refuted
both Neiderland’s impression that Schreber père “was revealed as a tyrant and
a sadist” and that the “childhood of Schreber fils [was] a nightmare of physical
and mental oppression” (p. 00) and Schatzman’s alleged improvements on
Niederland (Lothane, 1989a, 1989b, 1992b). It is also inaccurate that Schatz-
man “regarded Freud’s thesis about Schreber’s repressed homosexual feelings
towards his father as preposterous irrelevancy” (p. 00). Schatzman critiqued
Freud’s Oedipus complex if it meant the son’s unprovoked feelings toward the
father, but maintained instead the interpersonal idea that the father provoked
those feelings in the son by his own behavior, a view later espoused by Nieder-
land. Even as Niederland, Schatzman, and others were talking past each other
as they became entangled in their various confrontations, no light was thrown
on the matter by Israels (1989), nor was it accurate for Malcolm to say that
“the trouble the Freudians had with Schatzman was like a dress rehearsal they
were going to have with Masson” (p. 00)—this nothing but hype—for Masson
did not present anything new in his Denver lecture. (2) Masson talks to Mal-
colm about issues he will discuss in a forthcoming book, which came out in
1986. Referring to how Anna Freud and Eissler did not want to hear another
thing about seduction, Masson says:
“It was the same thing with my discovery about the Schreber case. That was even
more appalling. I found an 1884 article in Freud’s library written by Paul Flechsig,
Schreber’s psychiatrist, which he had personally sent to Freud, reporting that he
performed castration experiments on hysterical and obsessional patients in his
asylum. This means that Freud . . . still could write that Schreber suffered from
the delusion that the great Paul Flechsig wanted to castrate him. I think Freud was
a great and remarkable thinker, but he wasn’t honest. He was a man who just lost
his courage. His entire theory after he abandoned the seduction theory was the
product of moral cowardice, because Freud knew that Schreber was in an asylum
where they were trying to castrate him.” (p. 149)
Two “diagnoses” apply to Masson in this case: cryptomnesia and scientific para-
noia. The first concerns the “discovery” of Flechsig’s 1884 paper and the “ker-
nel of truth” in Schreber’s alleged castration fears, made already by Niederland
in 1968 in a paper published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Associa-
tion; the second involves the sense of seeing the same ideas everywhere, like the
paranoiac sees enemies, in this case a connection to seduction and to Freud’s
dishonesty. There is no way to determine how and when that paper of Flech-
sig’s ended up in Freud’s library.
Actually, Flechsig performed no experiments. He had a few of his female
patients treated with the then rather common method of hysterectomy, be-
cause hysteria literally meant caused by hystera, or womb; men were thus no
immediate candidates for surgical castration. Schreber was traumatized by
Flechsig in other ways: by the fears that Flechsig, the “god” who related only
corpses, might be waiting for him to die so that he would get hold of his brain
for autopsy and diagnosis, or to be pickled in a glass jar like the many that
lined the brain museum adjoining Flechsig’s office. Besides, Schreber imagined
his own unmanning negatively as a prelude to sexual abuse by others, mainly
rough attendants, or positively, or figuratively, as a transformation into a woman
(see Lothane, 1992, 1993). However, Masson was right in being concerned with
the impact of psychiatrists per se on Schreber, which he did not consider be-
yond his narrow take on it, as did Freud, Niederland, and Israels.
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FREUD’S ALLEGED REPUDIATION

OF THE SEDUCTION THEORY REVISITED:

Masson, 1984c), surely an exaggeration. The ensuing media cir-

THEORY VERSUS METHOD, MYTHOLOGY

tive philosophy metapsychology, and, in a more whimsical vein,

Cannot the same be said to-day of your own Physics?” Earlier in

What Freud had in mind as his mythology were such abstract

often enough resulting in considerable suffering for the warring

THE WARS OF SEDUCTION

seduction theory (Garcia, 1987; Lothane, 1987b; Schimek, 1987;

the Character and Sexual Development of Children” (unlike the

uncovering memories of childhood trauma and was critical of

the child of such a parent becomes the object of defused aggres-

This passage could have been written by Ferenczi or by any

extensively from Ferenczi’s “comprehensive anticipation of two

illness materialized in the researches of W. G. Niederland, from

and heavily involved in Indian philosophy . . . [and] discussions

such as Jacob Arlow or Leo Stone, Freud was an infallible ge-

once again, “This is not to deny psychic reality to fantasies but

that Freud wondered whether Moritz Schreber might have been

Emma Eckstein, Freud’s hysteric patient, whom he had referred

Janet Malcolm’s articles and book, enraged many Freudian psy-

THE HIGHER THEY RISE, THE HARDER THEY FALL

The great Osler warned doctors in pursuit of fame to beware of

torted, “What do you do with something like Auschwitz?” One

edged by Eissler himself (Masson, 1990). In those years a similar

Congress and, as Eissler promised him, to “do what you want,”

father gave up the seduction theory. Certainly it was his clinical

making conscious what has so far been unconscious. (Freud,

psychoanalysis is still with us, but mightily buffeted by such winds

mostly in institutional settings. The discussion was very lively,

TRAUMA OF REALITY, TRAUMA OF SEXUALITY

a result, “the most severe psychic trauma” (S.E., 2:26) following

In their quest of a new healing method, Breuer and Freud

external events determined the pathology of hysteria . . . [so] ob-

But trauma, like anything else that happens, is preserved in

ulation in the nervous system, in which the pathogenic process

choneuroses: here sexuality was inhibited due to the deferred ef-

when the psychical traumas from which the hysterical symptoms

It now became necessary to align trauma with the psycho-

privileged causal role of sexuality in health and disease is a mat-

was created between outer environment and inner environment,

tradiction in definitely ascertainable circumstances” (Freud,

SEDUCTION AND TRAUMA: A RECANTATION THAT NEVER WAS

The most famous instance of the alleged recantation was a letter

ity in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth

Points 1 and 2: The nugget of a genuine discovery by Masson

ther understood, or analyzed, as having been set in motion in

or observation of them when they were together, into which he

The Wolf Man’s “seduction by his sister was certainly not a

the products of construction” (pp. 50–51). Now Freud reaches a

it does not necessarily follow that these previously unconscious

The idea that dreaming is a valid historical record and a

real problems of life, and he erred in his assumption that in

Freud completed the arc he began half a lifetime earlier, in the

CONCLUSION: FREUD BASHERS THEN AND NOW

A close rereading of Freud shows that the notion, still voiced

son’s passionate advocacy was seen as psychopathic arrogance.

changeability of etiology and ideology, and especially against ei-

ries of trauma, such as parental sexual abuse. Such “incorrect

ual lives of real persons must remain historical and ethical in

relations, both tender and erotic, and it is love and compassion

(1933). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child. Internat. J.