The real importance of the story of the seduction theory and its abandonment lies in its role as a myth of origins. In the traditional account of Freud’s intellectual development, psychoanalysis is born out of the rubble of the seduction hypothesis. The theory was the crippling error whose repudiation was the sine qua non of Freud’s intellectual breakthrough to infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and thus to the foundation of his new science. Ernest Jones calls the abandonment of the seduction theory “one of the great dividing lines in the story” of psychoanalysis.^[68] The notion that the seduction theory had to be shed in order for psychoanalysis to emerge is indeed the most potent and enduring component of the entire historical construct. It gains its plausibility largely from the circumstance that Freud first mentions the Oedipus complex in letters written in October 1897, less than a month after the famous renunciation of September 21, 1897. But I would suggest that we ought to be suspicious of this excessively mechanical and overneat conception, according to which the new (and historically important) idea automatically occupies the intellectual space vacated by its discredited predecessor. In view of Freud’s revived hopes for the seduction theory after September 21, 1897, his long delay in confessing his departures from it, and his continuing belief, to the end of his life, that childhood seductions were real and consequential, we would be better advised to speak of a tension, rather than a categorical opposition, between the seduction theory and the Oedipus theory. The decline of Freud’s confidence in the seduction etiology after September 1897 may have sped up the emergence of the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality. But the proposition that he would never have developed these ideas without abandoning the seduction theory is far from self-evident. Significantly, in a draft sent to Fliess in May 1897—that is, four months before he supposedly jettisoned the seduction hypothesis—Freud had already anticipated an important component of the Oedipus complex. He there observes that neurotics entertain “hostile impulses against parents,” and, further, that “this death wish is directed in sons against their fathers and in daughters against their mothers.”^[69]

The notion that the repudiation of the old theory was a necessary precondition for the rise of the new one did not occur to Freud until years later. Nowhere in the Fliess correspondence or in the classic psychoanalytic texts of the first decade of the twentieth century do we find Freud writing that he had to surmount his traumatic theory of hysteria in order to recognize the autonomous sources of infantile sexuality or the preeminent role of fantasy or the existence of Oedipal desires. Apparently he had not yet arrived at this historical construction. Instead, it makes its appearance, appropriately enough, in his earliest sustained attempt to produce an intellectual autobiography, the 1914 essay “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement.” Here for the first time we get the story of the seduction theory as a kind of felix culpa. Before he could formulate “the hypothesis of infantile sexuality,” Freud writes, “a mistaken idea had to be overcome which might have been almost fatal to the young science.”^[70] The “might have been” and the “almost” somewhat soften the impression of an irreconcilable antithesis between the seduction theory and the theory of infantile sexuality. Nonetheless, the succeeding account of his fortunate escape from the nearly fatal error betrays the sharply dichotomous structure—reality pitted against fantasy—that will distinguish all subsequent accounts of the seduction theory and its abandonment:

Influenced by Charcot’s view of the traumatic origin of hysteria, one was readily inclined to accept as true and aetiologically significant the statements made by patients in which they ascribed their symptoms to passive sexual experiences in the first years of childhood—to put it bluntly, to seduction. When this aetiology broke down under the weight of its own improbability and contradiction in definitely ascertainable circumstances, the result at first was helpless bewilderment. Analysis had led back to these infantile sexual traumas by the right path, and yet they were not true. The firm ground of reality was gone. At that time I would gladly have given up the whole work, just as my esteemed predecessor, Breuer, had done when he made his unwelcome discovery. Perhaps I persevered only because I no longer had any choice and could not then begin again at anything else. At last came the reflection that, after all, one had no right to despair because one has been deceived in one’s expectations; one must revise those expectations. If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in phantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. This reflection was soon followed by the discovery that these phantasies were intended to cover up the auto-erotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now, from behind the phantasies, the whole range of a child’s sexual life came to light.^[71]

The version of this same historical sequence written a decade later in the Autobiographical Study—Freud’s most ambitious effort to fashion a coherent narrative of his intellectual development—begins with a slightly stronger assertion of irreconcilable opposition between the two theories. Here Freud refers to the seduction hypothesis as “an error into which I fell for a while and which might well have had fatal consequences for the whole of my work.”^[72] The antithesis between reality and fantasy is drawn even more extremely than it was in “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement”—to the point that Freud overstates his actual opinion at the time, speaking of the seduction stories as invariably false. Likewise, fathers have become the archetypal seducers and daughters the archetypal victims. In effect, the dichotomous historical construct, with its familiar dramatis personae, has hardened into its definitive form:

Under the influence of the technical procedure which I used at that time, the majority of my patients reproduced from their childhood scenes in which they were sexually seduced by some grown-up person. With female patients the part of seducer was almost always assigned to their father. I believed these stories, and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the subsequent neurosis in these experiences of sexual seduction in childhood. My confidence was strengthened by a few cases in which relations of this kind with a father, uncle, or elder brother had continued up to an age at which memory was to be trusted. If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him; though I may plead that this was at a time when I was intentionally keeping my critical faculty in abeyance so as to preserve an unprejudiced and receptive attitude towards the many novelties which were coming to my notice every day. When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them, I was for some time completely at a loss. My confidence alike in my technique and in its results suffered a severe blow; it could not be disputed that I had arrived at these scenes by a technical method which I considered correct, and their subject-matter was unquestionably related to the symptoms from which my investigation had started. When I had pulled myself together, I was able to draw the right conclusions from my discovery: namely, that the neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful phantasies, and that as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material reality. I do not believe even now that I forced the seduction-phantasies on my patients, that I “suggested” them. I had in fact stumbled for the first time upon the Oedipus complex, which was later to assume such an overwhelming importance, but which I did not recognize as yet in its disguise of phantasy.^[73]

This account, even more than its predecessor of 1914, has all the earmarks of a well-made play. The narrative is altogether too shapely: its protagonist enters boldly upon his intellectual quest, suffers a crisis of faith, but emerges in the end all the more gloriously for having triumphed over his error. It brings to mind Wordsworth’s artful construction of his life as a “crisis-autobiography” in The Prelude,^[74] where the poet’s illusory hopes for the French Revolution play a role analogous to Freud’s mistaken belief in the seduction hypothesis. As Freud himself, following Kipling, might have said, it is a “just-so” story, an intellectual romance, written, significantly, long after the events it purports to chronicle. It exhibits exactly the sort of fierce “retrospective patterning” that ought to arouse our suspicions. The actual history of the seduction theory is more prosaic, ragged, and inconclusive.