The Abandoned Seduction Theory

To appreciate the impact of The Assault on Truth, one must begin with a firm understanding of the place of the seduction theory in the history of Freud’s thought. More precisely, one must begin with an understanding of the place the seduction theory has come to occupy in the traditional story of Freud’s intellectual development. Without exaggeration, the abandonment of the seduction hypothesis figures as the central event in the discovery of psychoanalysis, both in Freud’s own account and in that of his biographers. Thus, in championing the seduction theory and questioning the validity of Freud’s reasons for rejecting it, Masson’s book undermines the received conception of Freud’s intellectual achievement, just as it casts doubt on his integrity.

For approximately four years during the mid-1890s, Freud believed that certain forms of mental illness, notably hysteria, originated in premature sexual traumas. His hysterical patients, he became convinced, had been subjected to sexual abuse—seduction—before puberty, and the repressed memory of those assaults was the cause of their illness. Typically (although not exclusively) Freud identified a parent, usually the father, as the author of these childhood assaults, just as a daughter was the characteristic victim. Freud first mentioned the seduction hypothesis in a letter to Fliess of May 30, 1893, and one can trace Freud’s rising confidence in the theory through the correspondence of the following years. On April 21, 1896, he presented his theory to the public in the form of a lecture, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” given before the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna. He published the lecture the following month. The theory was also articulated in two other scientific papers of 1896, “Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses” and “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence.”

But little more than a year later, on September 21, 1897, Freud wrote Fliess what has come to be regarded as the most important letter in the history of psychoanalysis. In it Freud announced that he had lost faith in his seduction hypothesis. As he put the matter himself, “I no longer believe in my neurotica”—his theory of the neuroses.^[1] Freud gave four reasons for his disbelief, of which the second was doubtless the weightiest:

The surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse—the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, with precisely the same conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable. The [incidence of] perversion would have to be immeasurably more frequent than the [resulting] hysteria because the illness, after all, occurs only where there has been an accumulation of events and there is a contributory factor that weakens the defense.^[2]

Freud didn’t confess his change of mind in print until eight years later, in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and then only in language that is surprisingly evasive. He eventually came to think that his patients’ accounts of seduction most often originated in fantasies, and that their root lay not in the perverse actions of adults but in the spontaneous sexual desires of children. In this fashion, the abandonment of the seduction theory promoted the emergence of the idea of infantile sexuality, and in particular the notion of the Oedipus complex—first mentioned in a letter to Fliess of October 15, 1897, less than a month after Freud announced his rejection of the seduction hypothesis. At the same time, the new role assigned to fantasy considerably enhanced the importance of the unconscious in Freud’s conception of psychic life. In other words, the two pillars of mature psychoanalytic theory—infantile sexuality and the unconscious—were, one might say, the intellectual beneficiaries of the change of view Freud announced in his September letter. Indeed, in later accounts of his intellectual development, Freud and his biographers were to maintain that if the error of the seduction theory had not been recognized, psychoanalysis would never have been born. Instead, Freud would have remained stuck in a mistaken environmental interpretation of psychological development and would have failed to grasp the role of indigenous desire and the unconscious in mental life.

In The Assault on Truth, however, Masson contends that Freud’s original view was correct and his abandonment of the seduction theory in error. How Masson knows this is far from clear. The most striking feature of his book is precisely the arguments he does not mount. Masson is much given to talking about documents, brandishing an unreconstructed positivism in an age when the linguistic turn has made such passions seem unfashionable, if not entirely without charm. But in fact he has uncovered no documentary evidence that would enable him to settle the empirical question. He does not, for example, have access to information about the cases of hysteria—“The Aetiology of Hysteria” mentions eighteen of them—that first formed the basis of Freud’s conviction and later became the source of his doubt. No clinical records or case notes have turned up. Moreover, even if such documents existed, one would be unable to penetrate beyond Freud’s conviction, at the time, that the stories he elicited from his patients were true, just as one cannot penetrate beyond his later conviction that many of them were false. The question, after all, is one of interpretation. Ultimately, Masson’s blithe assurance that the traumatic narratives are accurate depends on their inaccessibility: because they can never be shown to be false, Masson is free to assert their trustworthiness. Nor can he cite later studies establishing the correctness of Freud’s belief that hysteria is always caused by sexual abuse in childhood, because there are no such studies. The best he can do is invoke the opinions of Sandor Ferenczi (in 1932) and Robert Fliess (in 1974), who argued that childhood sexual traumas are more often a cause of mental illness than psychoanalysts have cared to recognize.

The real source of Masson’s persuasion lies in the political culture of the past decade, with its rising awareness of the abuse of children. Because we have grown increasingly conscious of sexual violence against children, Freud’s belief that his patients suffered such abuse, and that it dramatically shaped their lives, strikes Masson as entirely plausible. One senses that he would prefer to deflect attention from the specific etiological claim Freud advanced—that sexual seduction in childhood is the invariable cause of one particular form of mental illness, hysteria—to a more general assertion that childhood sexual abuse is both common and the source of emotional damage. At the same time, he perhaps feared that this more general proposition would have been easily absorbed by the psychoanalytic community, since, far from clinging obdurately to fantasy as the sole explanation for tales of seduction, any number of analysts have recently put greater emphasis on childhood sexual traumas and their psychic consequences. Masson’s hostility to psychoanalysis thus required a more decisive, a more dramatic, gesture. Hence his unqualified assertion that the seduction theory was absolutely correct and Freud’s abandonment of it utterly mistaken.

Yet even this assertion—although it might have elicited objections of the sort I have suggested about the lack of historical or clinical evidence—would never have resulted in the major controversy that The Assault on Truth unleashed. Credit for the book’s explosive impact goes not to the issue of seduction itself but rather to Masson’s contention about what motivated Freud to change his mind. Masson argues that Freud abandoned the seduction theory because he was a liar and a coward. Freud was a liar, according to Masson, because, even when he wrote the September 21 letter, at some level he still believed that his patients’ stories were true. He was a coward because the only consideration leading him to abandon the theory was his inability to bear the opposition it had provoked among his scientific contemporaries. Here we have a proposition perfectly calculated to cause scandal, especially when it is combined with repeated assertions that Freud’s spineless retreat from reality—his blaming of the child for the vices of the parent—established the pattern of psychoanalytic thought and practice right down to the present day.

Not surprisingly, Masson devotes much of his attention in The Assault on Truth to arguing the case for this spectacularly irreverent explanation of Freud’s change of heart. Yet even here one is immediately struck by what he does not do. In particular, he pays only passing attention to the reasons Freud gives in his September 21 letter for no longer believing the theory. Masson has just one thing to say about these reasons: they cannot be taken seriously because Freud had already raised, and rebutted, the same objections in his articles of 1896. Masson does not bother to demonstrate the identity of these two sets of objections, although such a demonstration would seem to be a minimum requirement for dismissing them as irrelevant. Nor does he seek to answer them. Most striking of all, he gives no ground for thinking that Freud himself did not really find these reasons persuasive. One would especially like to hear why we should not credit the genuineness of Freud’s conviction that, in view of the prevalence of hysteria, the traumatic etiology made sexual assaults on children much more common than seemed probable. The issue, be it noted, is not whether this reservation was justified, but whether Freud might legitimately have come to feel its weight. In effect, Masson implies that there could never be intellectually persuasive grounds for altering one’s opinion about childhood seduction. Because Freud had once believed his patients’ accounts, he must have been lying when he claimed to have changed his mind.

There is merit in Masson’s suggestion that the September 21, 1897, letter did not mark the end of Freud’s hopes for the seduction theory. In this regard Masson draws attention to two passages from subsequent letters to Fliess. Almost two months later, on December 12, 1897, Freud reported on a patient treated by Emma Eckstein. Eckstein had evidently obtained an account of a childhood seduction by the patient’s father: “My confidence in paternal etiology has risen greatly,” Freud writes. “Eckstein deliberately treated her patient in such a manner as not to give her the slightest hint of what would emerge from the unconscious and in the process obtained from her, among other things, the identical scenes with the father.”^[3] The phrase “paternal etiology” is Freud’s shorthand for his seduction hypothesis; the same locution occurs in a letter of April 28, 1897, where its meaning is unambiguous. In the present comment on Eckstein’s patient, Freud seems to be arguing against an imputation that the seduction stories were elicited by the analyst’s suggestion. Nonetheless, the statement that his “confidence” in the seduction theory has “risen greatly” shows that the renunciation letter of September 21, despite its categorical language (“I no longer believe in my neurotica”), did not mark a clean break with the hypothesis. But Masson overinterprets Freud’s briefly resurgent expectations, writing that “it was as though Freud were telling Fliess: I was too hasty, I believe I was right to think that seductions occur and can be remembered in analysis.”^[4]

In his next letter, dated December 22, 1897, Freud recounts another case in which a real childhood trauma occurs:

The intrinsic authenticity of infantile trauma is borne out by the following little incident which the patient claims to have observed as a three-year-old child. She goes into a dark room where her mother is carrying on and eavesdrops. She has good reason for identifying herself with this mother. The father belongs to the category of men who stab women, for whom bloody injuries are an erotic need. When she was two years old, he brutally deflowered her and infected her with his gonorrhea, as a consequence of which she became ill and her life was endangered by the loss of blood and vaginitis.^[5]

In contrast to his remark on Eckstein’s patient, Freud here makes no reference to the import of this case for his conviction about the “paternal etiology.” Moreover, even late in his career Freud continued to believe that a significant proportion of his patients’ accounts of childhood sexual abuse were genuine. Still, the proximity of this narrative to the Eckstein case mentioned some ten days earlier probably justifies seeing in it revived enthusiasm for the seduction hypothesis. Both passages imply a certain volatility in Freud’s thinking on the subject late in 1897. But they do not support the more radical proposition that he was dissembling when, in the famous renunciation letter of September 21, 1897, he told Fliess he no longer believed in the theory. We should hardly be surprised that Freud was reluctant to part with an idea from which, as he confessed, he had expected to win “eternal fame…, certain wealth, complete independence, travels, and lifting the children above the severe worries that robbed me of my youth.”^[6]

Like his contention that Freud’s patients were telling the truth about their childhood seductions, Masson’s accusation that Freud changed his mind because he couldn’t bear the disapproval of his medical colleagues floats in a kind of epistemological void. Masson can assert it without ever fearing that it might be disproved. After all, it alludes to an intrapsychic event—something invisible—against which countervailing evidence isn’t even imaginable. Instead, in order to lend the accusation an aura of plausibility, Masson attempts to clear a kind of historical space for it. In particular he draws attention to the hostile reception that greeted Freud’s lecture on “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” Writing to Fliess five days afterward, Freud reported:

A lecture on the etiology of hysteria at the psychiatric society was given an icy reception by the asses and a strange evaluation by Krafft-Ebing: “It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.” And this, after one has demonstrated to them the solution of a more-than-thousand-year-old problem, a caput Nili [source of the Nile]! They can go to hell, euphemistically expressed.^[7]

Masson’s conclusion that the hostility evoked by the lecture broke Freud’s spirit rests, above all, on a complaint registered in the next letter to Fliess: “I am as isolated as you would wish me to be. Word was given out to abandon me, for a void is forming all around me.”^[8] The presentation of the seduction hypothesis, in other words, resulted in Freud’s professional isolation, which he ultimately found unbearable and from which he sought to escape by sacrificing the theory. At the opposite end of the evidential tunnel, Masson notes that only after he had published his recantation (in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) was Freud able to gather about him a group of disciples and thus bring his intolerable isolation to an end.

What most astonishes in Masson’s presentation of this hypothesis is his failure to address the obvious objections. Perhaps first is the simple fact that less than two weeks after giving the lecture on “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” and after bemoaning his isolation, Freud resolved to publish the essay, almost as if to prove that he was not so easily cowed: “In defiance of my colleagues I wrote down in full for Paschkis [editor of the Wiener klinische Rundschau] my lecture on the etiology of hysteria. The first installment appears today.”^[9] This response is in keeping with everything we know about Freud’s character, as attested to by friend and foe alike: he positively reveled in opposition, and his mental toughness and tolerance for conflict were seemingly boundless. Opponents of psychoanalysis have often complained that he was immune to criticism, no matter how just. Masson’s image of him caving in to peer pressure on an issue where he felt truth was on his side makes no characterological sense.

The hypothesis is also beset by chronological problems, above all by the fact that Freud’s feeling of isolation predates the lecture of April 21, 1896. The Fliess correspondence and even the earlier letters to his wife give the impression that for years Freud positively cultivated his loneliness. In a typical complaint of March 16, 1896, he writes: “I am satisfied with my progress, but am contending with hostility and live in such isolation that one might imagine I had discovered the greatest truths.”^[10] In editing the Fliess correspondence, Masson tries to shape the evidence to fit his hypothesis by grouping the letters after the April 21, 1896, lecture under the rubric “Isolation from the Scientific Community.”^[11] But the abandonment of the seduction theory announced on September 21, 1897, cannot be meaningfully correlated with Freud’s feelings of isolation, which, while they may have reached a high point in the wake of his April 1896 lecture, pervaded the 1890s.

Masson’s own book supplies evidence that scholarly research on childhood sexual abuse did not necessarily constitute a bar to professional recognition in the nineteenth century. His second chapter argues that Freud may have been introduced to the seduction issue during his visit to Paris in 1885–86. There, Masson suggests, Freud probably became familiar with the views on child abuse of Ambroise Tardieu (1818–1879), Paul Bernard (1828–1886), and Paul Brouardel (1837–1906), all of whom wrote about sexual assaults on children. Freud attended Brouardel’s lectures at the Paris Morgue—Masson speculates that he may have observed Brouardel conduct autopsies on victims of child abuse—and he had the relevant publications of all three authorities in his library (although one cannot determine when he obtained them or, for that matter, whether he had read them, since none of them is annotated). If, as Masson argues, Freud was familiar with the work of these figures, he must also have known that their exploration of child abuse brought them not ignominy but renown. Masson himself notes that Tardieu was professor of legal medicine at the University of Paris, dean of the Faculty of Medicine, president of the Academy of Medicine in Paris, and, in the words of the Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales of 1885, “the most eminent representative of French legal medicine” (15). Bernard was professor of criminal law on the Faculty of Law in Lyon, while Brouardel succeeded to Tardieu’s chair in Paris and was known as the “Pontifex Maximus” (30) of French medicine. These rather inconvenient facts force Masson into arguing that Freud’s isolation was a strictly Viennese affair and, by implication, that he threw over the seduction theory to win back the good opinion of his local colleagues. It is a kind of perverse variation on the “Viennese” Freud that both Carl Schorske and William McGrath champion with such sophistication and delicacy. A more plausible reading would suggest that the opposition to the seduction theory, as registered by Freud’s colleagues in April of 1896, rested not, as Masson would have it, on some visceral inability to accept the reality of childhood sexual abuse but on a rational skepticism about the sweeping etiological generalization Freud had proposed, namely, that such abuse was the necessary and invariable cause of hysteria.

Surely, however, the most powerful objection to Masson’s thesis of moral cowardice is that Freud abandoned the seduction theory only to embrace an idea that was even more offensive to the prejudices of his culture, the theory of infantile sexuality. The new doctrine, far from being a gesture of reconciliation, transgressed the most cherished belief of nineteenth-century sexual ideology, the innocence of childhood. If Freud’s decision to abandon the seduction theory was guided by a wish to ingratiate himself once again with Vienna’s medical authorities, he chose a most unlikely way to achieve that end.