Freudian psychoanalysis: the great falsification.
Why Freud abandoned his theory of seduction and invented the Oedipus complex.
This is the story of three scandals. Three scandals whose stakes and impact have never ceased to affect our societies’ relationship with childhood. The story of three falsifications, three secrets closely guarded by the world of psychoanalysis.
Do we know that Freud’s editions (until the mid-80s!!) were cut to censor embarrassing passages? Passages likely to compromise the birth of this new “science” itself: Freudian psychoanalysis?
And what about the fact that, once these passages became accessible, the psychoanalytical community, particularly in France, did its utmost to conceal their existence and limit their scope? And all for the sole purpose of preserving a temple that might well have collapsed had it not been for this omerta?
I/. Jeffrey M. Masson: the author of an embarrassing book.
In 1984, psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaief Masson published The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
From the moment of its publication, the book sparked powerful controversies in psychoanalytical circles across the Atlantic, soon to be known as the Freud wars. Surprisingly, the book went virtually unnoticed in France, one of the world’s leading centers of Freudian psychoanalysis. The few mentions of the book by French theorists were limited to a scornful shrug of the shoulders1.
Let’s briefly recall the groundbreaking discovery made by the author, a discovery that was bound to shake the Freudian community at the time.
Masson’s book examines the reasons why Freud abandoned his famous theory of seduction.
It was on April 21, 1896, in Vienna, that Freud presented his revolutionary theory of mental illness in his paper “The Etiology of Hysteria” to his colleagues at the Society of Psychiatry and Neurology. Freud knew at the time that his conclusions, based on his clinical research, were new and iconoclastic, and that they would not go down well with the general public.
What Freud establishes is the following: the origin of neuroses is to be found in the experience of a real early trauma experienced by patients. This trauma is, moreover, of sexual origin. To put it plainly, what later came to be known as “seduction theory” was the assertion that real sexual abuse, often within the context of close relations or the family, was at the root of neurotic symptoms, and could not be a product of the imagination.
Vergewaltigung (rape), Missbrauch (abuse), Verführung (seduction), Angriff (attack), Attentat (attack, in Freud’s words), all terms which show that Freud minced no words in asserting the reality of incest experienced, not fantasized.
The reaction of the psychiatric and psychoanalytical community of the time was swift, and can be summed up by Freud’s bitter comment on the reception of his theory:
“The lecture on the etiology of hysteria at the Psychiatric Society received a frosty reception from these asses, and, from Krafft-Ebing le director of séance, this strange comment: “It looks like a scientific fable”. And this after I had pointed out the solution to a problem that goes back thousands of years, the caput Nili! la source of Nil”
Although the revelation of the frequency of sexual assault and incest in Viennese society at the time, as Freud had expected, triggered an outcry of outraged denial, the pugnacious researcher that he was at the time nevertheless held firm….quoqueque temps.
II/. “What have we done to you, O poor child? “2
And then, suddenly, there’s a turnaround3.
As early as 1897, Freud announced that he “no longer believed in his neurotica (theory of neurosis)”. He had made a mistake. He said he’d naively taken the word of patients who’d given nothing but affabulations. Instead of traumatic acts actually experienced, the clinic would in fact have revealed sexual fantasies emanating from the patient, and not originating in any experienced aggression.
This key moment in the evolution of Freudian theory is well known. It was during this renunciation that Freud introduced the theory of the Oedipus complex, the cornerstone of Freudian psychoanalysis. Everything changes in Freud’s discourse. The patient is sick of his
sexual fantasies that he projects onto others. Unbearable for the conscious psyche, these contents are both the object of repression (a fundamental notion that Freud also brought to light at the time) and the cause of clinically observed symptomatology.
Freud also introduced the concept of the “sexual constitution” structuring the human psyche. The “innate force of perverse tendencies” revealed by these fantasies, and which accounts for pathology, would soon be used to account for a universal structuring in human beings, the very structuring he chose to thematize in the form of the Oedipus myth.
No abuse, then, of which the patients had been victims in childhood. Just fantasies revealing the profoundly sexual (and polymorphously perverse!) underpinnings of their psyches.
III. A beautiful corpse… in Freud’s closet.
What does Masson’s 1984 book reveal?
Thanks to the discovery of previously unpublished documents (he was then Director of Projects at the Freud Archives in London!), Masson realized that the abandonment of the theory of seduction, which shifted guilt onto the patient’s side, was based on less clear, less scientific motives than the official story had been led to believe.
He also discovered that Freud’s widely published correspondence had undergone unreported cuts4 . Among these, passages from letters to Fliess particularly attract his attention.
In these passages, Freud does not simply express the fact that maintaining his theory of seduction would have cost him too much professionally, ruining his personal ambitions5. The September 21, 1897 letter to Wilhelm Fliess mentions that this theory denouncing the reality of incest would have involved “accusing the father of being perverse, including my own”. So Freud, in this passage revealed by Masson, suggests that his father himself had been guilty of perverse sexual acts of an incestuous nature. The letter of February 11 of the same year to the same addressee is even clearer:
Unfortunately my own father,” writes Freud, ”was one of these perverts; he is the cause of my brother’s hysteria (whose symptoms are in the whole of the processes identification) and some of my younger sisters. The frequency of this phenomenon often gives me pause for thought”.
Freud’s confession to Fliess, cut off in the first editions of their correspondence, should have triggered a veritable tsunami within the psychoanalytical community and the psychiatric clinic claiming to be Freud’s own. The fact that Freud’s father was, by his own admission, a sexual pervert who had abused his own children6 sheds new light on the reason for abandoning the first theory in favor of the Oedipus theory, making the real aggressor disappear. It’s not hard to imagine that questioning his own father’s guilt had, at the very least, played a part in Freud’s denial.
Nothing of the sort was undertaken, however. Calling the Oedipus into question, reconsidering Freud’s radical renunciation in the light of these revelations, was too threatening for the psychoanalytical community to venture into. A dogma, then, which it would have been fatal for the discipline to touch7.
A suspicious renunciation of a theory that the young Freud knew to be solidly supported by clinical evidence? Were the reasons for his abandonment unrelated to any scientific preoccupation? An abusive father to protect? None of this was enough to unsettle the psychoanalytical community, which was quick to hush up the affair. The very few studies carried out in this direction were simply swept under the carpet, with the complicity of the University8.
So let’s ask the question.
Under the benevolent tutelage of our governments and the international institutions in charge of child protection, the sexualization of children (including from the earliest age) is today making a forcible entry into schools under the banner of “education in emotional life, relationships and sexuality”. Revelations about the scale of pedo-crime suggest the existence of a frightening tip of the child abuse iceberg. The leniency shown by the judicial authorities towards sex crimes is as astonishing as it is disgusting.
Isn’t it time we asked ourselves what role the dogmas of Freudian psychoanalysis have played in the formation of a collective ideology? An ideology in which the real aggressor, the perverse adult, vanished, taking with him an innocent child, a stranger to the adult business of sexuality, to impose on our consciences the image of a little being inhabited by perverse fantasies?
It’s an ideology built by Freud from scratch, making the reality of the crimes disappear behind a smokescreen that the psychoanalytical community has never ceased to nurture.
Further reading:
Jeffrey Masson: Investigating the Freud archives. From real abuses to pseudo-fantasms. L’instant présent. New edition 2003. Filmmaker Michel Meignant has made a film based on Jeffrey Masson’s book: https://www.laveritesurfreud.fr/
Marie Balmary: L’homme aux statues. Freud et la faute cachée du père. Grasset, 1979.
Pierre Sabourin: Psychanalyse, abus sexuels et langue de bois, Le coq héron, n°146, May 1997.
Philippe Laporte: Freud et son père in L’érotisme ou le mensonge de Freud. Ed. Connaissances et savoirs, 2012.1. Jean Laplanche, one of the most important theorists of Freudism, simply mentions: “Masson, for example, limits himself to factual seduction. I’m always amused by the subtitle of his book ‘Freud suppresses the theory of seduction’, because it shows that Masson understood absolutely nothing about this theory”. In Seduction, Translation and the Drives. Dossier edited by John Fletcher and Martin Stanton, Psychoanalytic Forum: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1992. What was at stake in Masson’s discovery, which was capable of drawing back the theoretical curtain on Freudian psychoanalysis, should have aroused more than “amusement” on the part of a theorist of this stature. Following in Laplanche’s footsteps, French theorists did not comment on the substance of Masson’s discovery, and mostly contented themselves with ad personam attacks.
2. “Was hat man dir du weapons Kind getan?” From Goethe’s poem “Mignon”, which Freud had originally chosen as the motto of psychoanalysis.
3. Freud’s letter of September 21, 1897 to Fliess is the first mention of his abandonment of the theory of seduction. The first public expression of this renunciation is found in a text by Freud inserted into psychiatrist Leopold Löwenfeld’s “Sexual Life and Neurosis” at the latter’s request. See “Mon point de vue sur le rôle joué par la sexualité dans l’étiologie des névroses”, Vie sexuelle et névrose. Wiesbaden, 1904. In Ma vie et la psychanalyse (My Life and Psychoanalysis), Freud once again clearly disavowed his first theory: “I was finally forced to admit that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies that my patients had invented”.
4. These cuts turned out to be clear censorship on the part of the publishers, notably on the recommendation of Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud and Marie Bonaparte. 133 letters and manuscripts, out of a total of 284, were the subject of these unreported cuts, or were simply removed from the German and French editions of Freud’s complete works. For more on the eventful history of the publication of the Fliess-Freud correspondence, see for example: Sophie Aouillé: À propos de la parution des Lettres à Fliess de Sigmund Freud, Revue Psychanalyse, n°9, May 2007.
5. The Freud-Fliess correspondence (not redacted) clearly shows that Freud could not bear the ostracism of the psychoanalytical community following his presentation of the theory of seduction. Career, fame, financial ease – these were all things Freud admitted he could not give up. Having disavowed his initial theory, Freud set about turning his new sexual theory, postulating infantile sexual theory in place of experienced aggression, into a veritable dogma. In his autobiography, Jung recounts Freud’s insistence on this point. “Ich erinnere mich noch lebhaft, wie Freud, zu mir sagte: Mein lieber Jung, versprechen Sie mir, nie die Sexualtheorie aufzugeben. Das ist das Allerwesentliche. Sehen Sie, wir müssen daraus ein Dogma machen, ein unerschütterliches Bollwerk”I still remember very clearly how Freud said to me: My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon sexual theory. It’s the essential, the foundation of everything. You see, we must make it a dogma, an impregnable bastion. C.G.Jung, Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken, Walter Verlag, 1971, pp.154-155.
6. The question of his father’s abuse of Freud himself is obviously a central one, and one that the psychoanalytical community has been quick…not to ask. Pierre Sabourin is one of the few psychoanalysts to have broken the omerta on this issue. See : Revue “Le coq-héron” n°248, “Freud aurait-il été abusé? On est prié de fermer les yeux”, pp. 98-103.
7. Freud himself was well aware that psychoanalysis as a science could never have recovered from the rehabilitation of seduction theory. In Contribution à l’histoire du mouvement psychanalytique, he writes: “On the way de to the creation of psychanalyse, it was necessary to overcome an erroneous idea, which could have been almost fatal to this young science”. Anna Freud, asked by Jeffrey Masson why Freud’s letters had been blacked out in the first editions, gave a similar answer: psychoanalysis would never have seen the light of day.
8. After five years of doctoral research, psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist Marie Balmary was refused permission to defend her thesis on the grounds that it established that Freud had renounced not an error (real child abuse) but a genuine discovery. “I can’t let you write that. You’re casting anathema on psychoanalysis”, she was told by her thesis supervisor. In 1979, Grasset agreed to publish her work under the title L’homme aux statues: L’homme aux statues. Freud et la faute cachée du père. It was not until the #Metoo movement that the press began to talk about this affair again – a little!
