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Karin Ahbel-Rappe 54/1

“I NO LONGER BELIEVE”:
DID FREUD ABANDON THE
SEDUCTION THEORY?

Recent accounts of the seduction theory and the question of its aban-
donment have emphasized the continuity of Freud’s work before
and after the seduction theory, claiming that Freud did not abandon
his concern with the event of seduction but rather came to appreciate
that an understanding of fantasy was also essential. This claim is chal-
lenged. It is shown that Freud did abandon the passionate concerns of
his seduction theory for the most part; that he left behind his early inter-
est in reconstructing unconscious infantile incest and focused instead
on later, conscious seduction; that he at times clearly reduced apparent
paternal incest to fantasy; that he turned away from the phenome-
nology of incest he had begun to develop; and that he theoretically
nullified the value of the difference between real and fantasied seduc-
tion. It is also shown that, contrary to a persistent concern in psycho-
analytic history, attention to actual seduction need not detract from the
essential psychoanalytic concern with fantasy and infantile sexuality.
Thinking about incest specifically illuminates the capacity for fantasizing,
the core of the Freudian psyche. In this way the intuition of the
seduction theory that there is something of distinctive psychoanalytic
significance about incest finds support.

“I no longer no longer believe in my neurotica.” So wrote Freud

on September 21, 1897, to Wilhelm Fliess. According to the
“official” history of psychoanalysis, this epistolary moment marks the
very origin of psychoanalysis. Recognized historiographers of psycho-
analysis tell us that this is the moment of Freud’s realization that what
his patients had reported as events of being seduced were rather seduc-
tion fantasies expressing oedipal wishes and that he consequently aban-
doned the seduction theory in favor of a theory of fantasy and infantile
sexuality (see, e.g., Jones 1953; Kris 1954; Gay 1988). Indeed, Freud
Michigan Psychoanalytic Council, Ann Arbor.
Submitted for publication May 3, 2004.

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himself, years after 1897, sometimes told the same story about the
meaning of this historical moment (Freud 1914, 1925, 1933).
We are no longer simply content with this iconic narrative. The
history of psychoanalysis, including the history of the seduction theory
and the question of its abandonment, continues to be written, revised,
and reversed. A few analysts—notably Masson (1984) and Miller
(1984)—have offered truly iconoclastic versions, claiming that the
abandonment of the seduction theory was a grave mistake, that psycho-
analysis itself was conceived in and as an “assault on truth.” These
theorists envision what came after the seduction theory as radically
different from and deficient relative to it.
However, most of the newer histories have emphasized the
continuity of Freud’s thinking before and after the seduction theory,
primarily by attempting to show that Freud did not leave behind his
concern for the event of seduction and its impact. These claim that
the baby was not thrown out with the bathwater; that there was no real
loss in the abandonment of the seduction theory; that Freud simply
improved his theory according to new understanding about fantasy
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without sacrificing attention to actual seduction.
It is to this conversation about the history and meaning of seduc-
tion, the seduction theory, and its abandonment that I wish to con-
tribute. There is, of course, no one meaning of the seduction theory or
its abandonment. We read with our own interests in mind, and respond
to what we find interesting. Situated as we are in this postmodern world
with its acute self-consciousness, we can’t but see things like this. We
see our seeing itself as situated. However, I suspect most of us also
believe that we can’t say just anything, that our attempts to think and
find and make meaning are—or should be—constrained or inspired by
something we awkwardly call reality. I hope to offer a reading that is
faithful to a careful and open-minded reading of Freud, and that has
relevance for contemporary psychoanalytic thinking and practice.
My position differs from the official, the iconoclastic, and what
I will call the continuist positions. I will show that the official position
misreads the September 21 letter, falsely attributing some of Freud’s
later positions to this original moment of doubt. Unlike the iconoclasts,
I believe that Freud’s eventual movement away from the seduction
theory toward a theory of infantile sexuality unquestionably includes
a profound turn of thought, central to the meaning of psychoanalysis, a
position I take as granted for the purposes of this essay. But unlike the

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

continuists, I am convinced there was also a true loss in the abandon-

ment of the seduction theory—a loss to psychoanalysis, a psycho-
analytic loss. I will show that Freud’s concern with infantile incest was
radically reduced and will discuss the metapsychological commitments
that contributed to this shift. And I will counter the concern that atten-
tion to the event of incest detracts from a broader focus on the whole
world of psychic reality, of fantasy and infantile sexuality. The seduc-
tion theory includes the intuition that there is something of particular
psychoanalytic significance about the event of incest, which I believe
has to do with the way the event of incest itself blurs for its victim the
very capacity to differentiate fantasy from reality. This insight, I will
maintain, is central to the psychoanalytic significance of incest and
hence to the enduring value of the seduction theory. I will show that, in
light of this insight, the seduction theory does not oppose a theory of
fantasy, but rather leads to a deepened understanding of it.

THE SEDUCTION THEORY AND FREUD’S DOUBTS

173
To begin, let me retrace some familiar territory in order to locate this
discussion. Between Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud 1895)
and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud developed a theory
about the genesis of neurosis in which the event of Verführung, seduc-
tion, is a key element. Freud presented this theory, which has come
to be known as the seduction theory, in three papers published in 1896:
“The Aetiology of Hysteria”(1896a), “Further Remarks on the Neuro-
psychoses of Defence” (1896b), and “Heredity and the Aetiology of the
Neuroses” (1896c).
The seduction theory says that neurotic symptoms remember
trauma. It shows how events that cannot be assimilated into conscious
memory are reproduced in symptoms, in “mnemic symbols” of the
trauma (1896a, p. 193). In this respect, the seduction theory is continu-
ous with the thinking of the Studies—hysterics suffer from reminis-
cences, from repressed memories.
But in the Studies trauma could be constituted by any number of
events, including erotic longings, illness, and incest (see Blass and
Simon 1994). Freud walked away from the Studies on the scent of some-
thing unique about sexual trauma. In the seduction theory, the sexual
hypothesis took a very specific form. The new claim in the 1896 papers
is that the psychogenic trauma causing neurosis is invariably that of

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the sexual abuse of a child in early childhood (usually before age four)
by an adult or an older child, the latter himself the victim of abuse.
Note that Freud in the seduction theory believed that seductions
between children were derivative of adult seduction: “Every such rela-
tionship between children postulates a previous seduction of one of
them by an adult” (1896a, p. 215). The seduction theory, then, postu-
lates unconscious incest in infancy as the specific cause of neurosis,
and seduction designates the event of an adult committing incest with
a very young child.
Another critical document as regards the seduction theory is
Freud’s correspondence with Fliess over the period 1887–1904 (Freud
1985,1986). As the correspondence starts before the theory is publicly
presented, we see Freud’s initial thinking about it. We also see his with-
drawal from it, years before he discussed that position publicly. And
it includes the famous September 21, 1897, letter, which has become
iconic as the scene of the abandonment of the seduction theory, and
which is our only documentation of what Freud’s doubts were about
the theory at the time he f irst came to doubt it. I will examine the
174
letter shortly. As we will see, when Freud gave accounts in later writ-
ings of his reasons for abandoning the theory, they differ from, and in
fact distort, his original account.
The letters also offer a more specialized version of the seduction
theory that puts the father in particular—as opposed to adult caretakers
in general—in the place of the seducer. The “paternal etiology” (Freud
1986, p. 237) 1 was never presented directly in any of Freud's published
writings, although in later writings when Freud described the seduction
theory as a sort of mistake, it was often in reference to the father
version. That is, when Freud referred back to the seduction theory, he
often did so as if the seduction theory had always been a theory about
fathers, and, as we'll see, he often reduced paternal incest via the theory
of oedipal fantasy he had developed in the meantime. The father
etiology, then, is a sort of doubled phantom—never appearing in pub-
lic, and scotomized in Freud’s later theorizing.
It is important to note that the seduction theory, while claiming
that an act of incest is an invariant causal factor in neurosis, by no
means reduces to that claim. It is, in fact, already a complex psycho-
logical theory, with a place for the work of repression, defense, and

1All translations from the Fliess correspondence are my own.

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

the unconscious (see Garcia 1987; Schimek 1987). As Freud put it,
“no hysterical symptom can arise from a real experience alone”
(1896a, p. 197). Instead, hysteria arises nachträglich, by way of deferral.
A sexual experience at puberty activates, by association, an infantile
sexual seduction. The original seduction stays in a sort of psychic
storage, its energy only awakened by association with the pubertal
event. At that point the ego is overwhelmed, and both events are
repressed. The hysterical symptoms arise at this point as memory
traces of the forgotten. One might say that on this view symptoms are
fantasies of the events they remember. For example, a paralyzed limb
may violate the laws of physical anatomy but memorialize the psycho-
anatomy of a physical violation (Freud 1893).
On Freud’s seduction view, then, it is only as deferred and defended
that incest is neurotogenic. The deferral of the impact of the infantile
sexual experience, its nachträglich quality, is conceived by Freud
at this time in terms of an infancy innocent of sexuality. The incestuous
act has no impact at the time of its occurrence, as the infant is not
equipped to perceive sexual meaning. The event becomes traumatic
175
only in time and by association with developed sexuality. However,
it should be noted that Freud’s mature conceptions of infantile sexu-
ality preserve and indeed emphasize the phasic quality of developing
sexuality, thus preserving for him the relevance of deferred sexual mean-
ing. Thus Strachey is mistaken when he suggests that the concept of
deferred action “lost its meaning owing to the discovery of infantile
sexuality” (in Freud 1896b, p. 161). We have only to consult the case
of the Wolf Man, written in the bloom of Freud’s theory of infantile
sexuality and in which the concept of deferral of sexual meaning fig-
ures so prominently, to see that it did not lose its meaning for Freud.
The temporality of sexuality figures into my developing thesis, and
I will return to it later.
Freud provides relatively few details about the nature of his clini-
cal evidence for the seduction theory. But it is clear that the idea that
his patients had been seduced is presented by Freud in the 1896 papers
and the Fliess letters as his reconstruction based on his patients’
material, and not the result of their telling him they had been seduced.
As Freud questioned his patients about their histories, he found their
material moving back farther and farther into the past, and finally to
what Freud called the “reproduction of scenes,” scenes that Freud inter-
preted as evidence for the occurrence of infantile incest. We know from

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the early papers that these reproductions involved intense emotional

and perceptual experiences that suggested particular shapes of infantile
incest. Freud was impressed with the emotional quality of these experi-
ences. For him they had the affective ring of truth. Even more, he
was convinced by the “associative and logical ties between those
scenes and the hysterical symptoms” (1896a, p. 210). Infantile incest
was the reconstructive inference that he felt best made sense of a body
of data, often the body’s own data of contractures, paralyses, pains, and
anesthesias.
We are not talking, then, about patients informing Freud that they
had experienced incest. To the extent that Freud is consistent, it must be
so, since the theory says that only unremembered, unconscious infan-
tile sexual trauma is neurotogenic. In fact, Freud (1896b) emphasizes
his patients’ anguished reluctance to believe in his reconstructions
as more testimony to their veracity. It is he—the analyst—who must
carry the conviction of reality.
Schimek (1987) argues persuasively for this reading, according
to which Freud reconstructed incest rather than having patients report
176
it to him. Schimek finds this significant because he takes it to refute
Masson’s claim that Freud suppressed evidence of seduction. I will
emphasize it because it illuminates a crucial aspect of what was left
behind with the seduction theory, namely, interest in the reconstruction
of infantile incest.
In his published writings of 1896, then, Freud argued vigorously
and determinedly for the seduction theory. Then came the letter of
September 21, 1897: “I no longer believe in my neurotica.” In the
letter, Freud expresses four doubts about his theory. The first concerns
dissatisfying clinical results: interminable analyses, poor outcomes, pre-
mature terminations. But throughout the rest of the letters, and often
clearly in the context of thinking centered in the idea of fantasy, Freud
expresses the same clinical disappointment. If clinical disappointment
argues against the seduction theory, then presumably it argues against
the “fantasy theory” as well. The second doubt is based on the high
incidence of sexual abuse the theory requires in order to account for the
high incidence of hysteria, whereas “such a distribution of perversion
against children is very unlikely” (Freud 1986, p. 283). Here we must
note that in 1896 Freud had already explicitly considered the objection
that the theory requires a higher incidence of seduction than is plausible
(1896a). At that time he accepted this implication of his theory in the

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

posture of a resolute scientist with the courage of his f indings. It

is curious indeed if Freud is counting a point of implausibility as
an argument against his theory, given that he soon envisioned his
theory of infantile sexuality at the nadir of implausibility. In fact, Freud
seems, throughout his career, to have relished his role as theorizer of
the implausible.
Freud’s third and fourth doubts are more central to my argument.
Here is Freud’s description: “Third, the certain insight that in the un-
conscious there is no sign of reality, so that one cannot differentiate
between the truth and a fiction invested with feeling. (Consequently,
the solution remained that sexual fantasies regularly seize hold of
the theme of the parents). Fourth, the consideration that in the deepest
psychoses the unconscious memory does not force its way through, so
that the secret of experiences of childhood would also not reveal itself in
the most confused delirium. When one sees that the unconscious never
overcomes the resistance of the conscious, then the expectation that
in treatment the opposite has to happen, to the point of the complete
taming of the unconscious by the conscious, also sinks. I was so struck by
177
this that I was ready to give up two things: complete resolution of a
neurosis and the certain knowledge of its etiology in childhood. Now I
have no idea where I stand . . . ” (Freud 1986, pp. 283–284).
To my reading, this letter, especially the text of the third and fourth
doubts, has an aporetic quality. Rather than being the site of a categor-
ical abandonment, it is a site of uncertainty, of puzzlement, of confu-
sion. “I no longer believe,” we always remember Freud as having said.
But perhaps the mood of the letter is better conveyed with, “I have no
idea where I stand.” I just don’t know what to believe. It is in Freud’s
subsequent published writings that the puzzlement gives way to a more
categorical voice.
If we were to single out any sentence in this letter, and perhaps this
entire volume of letters, it must surely be this one: “There is no way to
tell the difference between truth and fiction invested with feeling.”
This is indeed a moment of aporia, as Freud comes to at least a tempo-
rary halt in the face of an undecidable difference.
Freud does not say in the letter that his patients’ reports of incest
turned out to be fantasies, as is so often claimed in psychoanalytic
histories (e.g., Jones 1953; Kris 1954; Gay 1988). Remember that his
patients’ “reports” were in fact Freud’s reconstructions, outcomes
of arduous analysis against strong resistance from his patients. What

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Freud is questioning in the September 21 letter can only be the status of

those reconstructions, in light of a new thought, namely, the undecid-
ability between incest event and incest fantasy, which opens up the dis-
orienting possibility that what he took to be event was fantasy. It would
be incoherent to say, “I can’t tell the difference between events and fan-
tasies; therefore, I realize these putative events are fantasies.” So when
Freud himself later accounted for this moment by saying that what his
patients reported as real events were fantasies, he has subjected the
moment to its own “reconstruction,” a point to which I will return.
What gets lost in this revisionism is the question of the difference
between a memory of having been seduced and a fantasy of having
been seduced. Or we might say that the revisionism itself docu-
ments the loss of this question. To my reading, the question of the
dif ference between a memory and a fantasy of seduction is a major
yield of Freud’s early theorizing on seduction, coming to a kind of
climax in the September 21 letter. Freud, however, did not keep the
question of this difference alive. As I will elaborate later, he was soon
to erase the difference as a matter of metapsychology. We might say
178
that he became indifferent to the question of the reality of seduction,
adopting himself the indif ference he attributed to the unconscious.
In the f inal part of my essay, I will explore how this disregard led
Freud away from important psychoanalytic insights about the nature
of oedipal wishing.
In Freud’s fourth motive for disbelief, he is thinking of the diffi-
culty of getting access to the secret of childhood incest. But, as I will
also elaborate later, Freud might have seen that the secretiveness of the
unconscious regarding childhood incest, rather than being a considera-
tion against the seduction theory, was in fact one of its discoveries. With
the seduction theory turning on the reconstruction of unconscious
incest, Freud was near the point of discovering incest’s particular,
and arguably unique, dynamic of near invisibility. Had Freud continued
this line of thinking, he would have been in a position to see how un-
remembered incest not only results in symptomatic memorials, but
damages the foundation of mind itself.
In the Fliess letters, the seduction theory continues to f igure
into Freud’s thinking to some extent for at least another year after
September 21, 1897. But there is a gradual decathexis of the seduction
theory and a growing focus on the role of fantasy. On February 19,
1899, Freud writes, “It is not only the dream that is a wish fulfillment,

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

also hysterical attacks” (1986, p. 377). Hysterics no longer suffer from

reminiscences but from wishes.
In Freud’s published works, the seduction theory falls silent for
nearly ten years after the 1896 papers. The next mention of it comes in
the Three Essays, in the context of Freud’s profound and revolution-
ary elaboration of infantile sexuality. In explaining the resurgence of
genitality in the oedipal years, Freud (1905b) refers back to his earlier
theory and says that he “overrated the importance of seduction in com-
parison with the factors of sexual constitution and development. Obviously
seduction is not required in order to arouse a child’s sexual life; that can
also come about spontaneously from internal causes” (pp. 190–191).
Then in 1906, in his first sustained public discussion of his changed
views regarding seduction, Freud explains that his early sample of neu-
rotics accidentally included a disproportionately large number of cases
of actual incest, and that he therefore overestimated the incidence of
seduction. He continues: “Moreover, I was at that period unable to dis-
tinguish with certainty between falsifications made by hysterics in their
memories of childhood and traces of real events. Since then I have
179
learned to explain a number of phantasies of seduction as attempts at
fending off memories of the subject’s own sexual activity (infantile
masturbation). When this point had been clarified, the ‘traumatic’ ele-
ment in the sexual experiences of childhood lost its importance and
what was left was the realization that infantile sexual activity (whether
spontaneous or provoked) prescribes the direction that will be taken by
later sexual life after maturity” (p. 274).
Notable here is the replacement of Freud’s doubting, wondering
state of mind in the 1897 letter with a confident, even dogmatic one. He
seems to imply that while then he was unable to distinguish with cer-
tainty between falsifications and real events, he can now. But how?
Freud is silent on this point, and we are left wondering about the source
of his confidence.

CONTINUIST ARGUMENTS

In any case, the 1906 paper clearly announces a departure from the
official seduction theory, a reconceptualization of the role of seduc-
tion in neurotogenesis. But how are we to describe this reconceptu-
alization? Did Freud really abandon the seduction theory? What exactly
did he abandon?

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 Karin Ahbel-Rappe

The seduction theory in its strictest sense claims that each and
every case of neurosis is caused by a seduction in infancy. Some have
made the following argument: If Freud conceived of even one case of
psychoneurosis not caused by infantile seduction, his theory is invali-
dated; Freud did come to conceive of cases of neurosis not caused by
actual seduction; therefore he abandoned the theory (see, e.g., Makari
1998; Eissler 1993).
What are we to say to this? The argument is clearly valid. But to
summarize the seduction theory and its abandonment in this way is to
reduce it to its most uninteresting. Our concern is not with the fate of
the seduction theory in this narrow sense, but with the fate of the whole
idea of seduction in Freud’s further theorizing.
And here is where the continuists come in, claiming that, after the
abandonment of the seduction theory in its strict sense, Freud persisted
in recognizing that actual seductions took place, and that they were
harmful (see, e.g., Hanly 1986; Garcia 1987; Eissler 1993; Lear 1996).
The essence of the continuist argument is that Freud did not ignore the
importance of seduction after the seduction theory, but rather simply
180
improved his theory by adding in concern for infantile sexuality and the
power of its fantasies.
I believe this is a mischaracterization. Freud does make occasional
comments after 1897 to the effect that seductions occur and are harm-
ful. But I have found that what Freud says about seduction is often cited
out of context in a way that distorts its import and conceals significant
departures from essential aspects of the seduction theory. Consider, for
example, the following passage from the Introductory Lectures, often
cited as evidence for the continuist case: “Phantasies of being seduced
are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies
but real memories” (Freud 1916–1917, p. 370). This is often where the
citation ends. Hanly (1986), Garcia (1987), and Blum (1994), to take
just a few examples, refer to this sentence as a clear indication that
Freud did not turn away from the reality of seduction.
But a consideration of the full passage tells quite a different story:

Phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often

they are not phantasies but real memories. Fortunately, however, they
are nevertheless not real as often as seemed at first to be shown by the
findings of analysis. Seduction by an older child or by one of the same
age is even more frequent than by an adult; and if in the case of girls who
produce such an event in the story of their childhood their father figures

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

fairly regularly as the seducer, there can be no doubt either of the

imaginary nature of the accusation or of the motive that has led to
it. A phantasy of being seduced when no seduction has occurred is usu-
ally employed by a child to screen the autoerotic period of his sexual
activity. He spares himself shame about masturbation by retrospec-
tively phantasying a desired object into these earliest times. You must
not suppose, however, that sexual abuse of a child by its nearest
male relatives belongs entirely to the realm of phantasy. Most ana-
lysts will have treated cases in which such events were real and could
be un-impeachably established; but even so they related to the later
years of childhood and had been transposed into earlier times [Freud
1916–1917, p. 370].

The opening sentence of this passage—to the effect that fantasies

of being seduced are often realities—clearly makes a poor summary
of it. Freud cannot be read by ellipsis. The restlessness of the passage
is striking, but its meaning is clear: infantile seductions by adults, the
cornerstone of the seduction theory, are elided. Women’s fantasies of
having been seduced by their fathers are uniformly interpreted via
oedipal desire. The reality of these seductions is denied. What remains 181
of real incest here are seductions by other children and from later child-
hood, defensively transposed into the early years that are crucial in the
seduction theory. In the seduction theory, such seductions of children by
other children were themselves referred to infantile seductions by adults.
That link is gone. Further, the real acts of seduction to which Freud refers
here are clear and “unimpeachable” historical events, not the uncon-
scious experiences of childhood requiring determined and laborious
reconstruction that Freud worked on with the seduction theory. There
has been a shift in the very meaning of seduction.
Garcia and Blum each turn to one of Freud’s major cases to support
the continuist case. They suggest that the central role of an event of
seduction in the Wolf Man case shows conclusively that Freud did not
abandon seduction as a neurotogenic factor (Garcia 1987; Blum 1994).
I agree that the Wolf Man case is a cental document in this discussion,
but I draw quite different conclusions.
Freud (1918) clearly attributes effects to the seduction of the Wolf
Man, saying that it “disturbed and diverted” (p. 108) the little Wolf
Man’s sexual development, substituting a passive feminine aim for an
active masculine one, leaving him vulnerable to sadistic-anal regression
in the face of castration threat. But to my mind, the two considerations
I offered concerning the passage from the Introductory Lectures apply

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to the Wolf Man as well, and seriously weaken the claim raised by
Garcia and Blum.
First of all, it is the seduction of one child by another—of the three-
year-old Wolf Man by his five-year-old sister—that is at issue in this
case. In the seduction theory, such a seduction implies a prior seduction
by an adult. If any version of the seduction theory had been guiding
Freud here, surely he would have at least raised the question of whether
the sister had herself been seduced earlier by an adult. That Freud does
not take this up as a possibility suggests more a negative hallucination
of his own theory than an allegiance to it. Instead Freud attributes the
sister’s “sexual precocity” to her having witnessed the primal scene. It
is important to explicitly notice that in 1918, more than twenty years
after his public repudiation of the seduction theory, Freud still believes
that the sister’s sexual advance to her brother needs some explanation,
but the possibility that she had been sexually abused does not occur to
him. The Wolf Man case—and perhaps the Wolf Man and his sister—
would have benefited from this formulation. It became known through
notes of the later analysis of the Wolf Man by Ruth Mack Brunswick
182
that the little Wolf Man was in all likelihood sexually violated by his
nurse (cited in Eissler 1993).
Second, recall once more that the seduction theory has to do with
unconscious scenes of incest, laboriously reconstructed. In the Wolf
Man case, the seduction is “suddenly called to mind” (p. 20)—that is,
remembered, not reconstructed—and Freud accepts its reality without
further ado. An “indisputable reality,” he calls it (p. 97), clearly in
contrast to infantile scenes (like the primal scene) that “have to be
divined—constructed—gradually and laboriously from an aggregate
of indicators” (p. 250).
That the seduction of the Wolf Man is regarded as an indisputable
reality is to my mind, then, not evidence that the case invokes the
seduction theory. To the contrary, it shows that the scope and meaning
of seduction have significantly changed. The reconstructive passion,
anguish, and labor in Wolf Man go to the primal scene, and not to any
seduction.
The Wolf Man case repeats the essential structure of the seduction
theory: an early sexual event (primal scene) is evoked later (in the wolf
dream) and then repressed, causing neurotic symptoms. And the
psychoanalytic task remains that of reconstructing the original scene.
But Freud never again actually applied this understanding and tech-

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

nique to an event of seduction; or at least he never again writes of actu-

ally reconstructing a scene of infantile incest. That is silent testimony,
testimony via absence, to the loss of the seduction theory.
It may appear that I am ignoring texts that go against my point. In
“The Question of Lay Analysis,” for example, Freud (1926, p. 216)
explains to a naive interlocutor that the material of some patients “has
enabled us to reconstruct certain external happenings, certain impres-
sive events of their childhood years, of which they have preserved no
conscious memory.” Among the sort of events that are reconstructed,
Freud includes “observations of sexual activities between adults, or
sexual experiences of his own with an adult or another child (no rare
events).” Freud also emphasizes the importance of inducing the memory
of “the patient’s own forgotten sexual activity as a child and also of
the intervention by the adults which brought it to an end.”
The more thoroughly we consider this passage the weaker it
becomes as evidence of Freud’s continued interest in reconstructing
incest. Strachey’s “sexual experiences of his own with an adult” trans-
lates Freud’s “eigene sexuelle Erfahrungen mit einem Erwachsenen”
183
(Freud 1926, p. 246), which I would prefer to render more straightfor-
wardly as “his own sexual experiences with an adult.” To our ears, this
phrase undoubtedly brings incest to mind, and perhaps that is what
Freud is thinking of. But remember, Freud is imagining himself here
in conversation with a psychoanalytically naive interlocutor, some-
one without the resonances of psychoanalytic history before 1926, and
certainly not of the history we know today. If Freud is thinking of
sexual abuse, why does he make so little effort to make this clear?
Further, “his own sexual experiences with an adult” is an ambiguous
locution so far as agency and responsibility go—who is to own respon-
sibility for these experiences? If the meaning is sexual abuse, the
phrase implicitly undermines what it is putatively trying to convey.
And “his own sexual experiences” is echoed in Freud’s mentioning the
child’s “own forgotten sexual activity.” With the latter phrase, Freud is
emphasizing the child’s motivated activity, presumably masturbatory
for the most part. Thus, the parallel locution rhetorically dilutes the
sense of sexual abuse even further. Finally, the explicit activity of
adults mentioned in this passage is that of interrupting children’s
masturbation, not initiating sexual activity with them.
A further problem with the continuist arguments is that they ignore
texts in which Freud unambiguously reduces putative events of

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seduction to fantasies of seduction. In 1925, for example, Freud writes of

“an error into which I fell for a while and which might well have had
fatal consequences for the whole of my work. 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. . . . I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of
seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies. . . .
the neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to
wishful phantasies. . . . I had in fact stumbled for the first time upon the
Oedipus complex. . . . which I did not recognize as yet in its disguise as
phantasy. . . . seduction during childhood retained a certain share,
though a humbler one, in the aetiology of neuroses. But the seducers
turned out as a rule to have been older children” (pp. 34–35). Here
Freud clearly interprets ostensible seduction events via wishful fan-
184
tasies. Apparently he no longer believes that his early sample over-
represented cases of seduction, as he claimed in 1906. We also see again
a slippage that can already be detected in the 1906 essay. Freud says
patients reproduced scenes of seduction, which connotes his recon-
struction of incest scenes, and then equates this to patients’ telling sto-
ries of having been seduced. And we see a repetition of the shift away
from adult seducers to other children.
In Freud’s 1933 account of the abandonment of the seduction
theory, the reconstruction of trauma disappears completely. “In the
period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile
sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had
been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize that these
reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symp-
toms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences. It was
only later that I was able to recognize in this phantasy of being seduced
by the father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in women”
(p. 120). Notice the generalizing language of these last two texts. The
rhetorical force of the passages is not that some scenes of infantile
sexual trauma turn out, as a matter of fact, to be derived from fantasies
(the point Freud seems to make in the 1906 essay), but that scenes of
infantile sexual trauma just are derived from fantasy. A statement to the

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

effect that Freud never denied the reality of seductions is not true to the
complexity of the matter. There is clearly a tendency in Freud toward
precisely such a denial.
These particular texts are among those in which Freud looks back
to give his own account of his repudiation of the seduction theory.
We see his revisionism at work—his unacknowledged slippage from
unconscious incest painstakingly reconstructed by analyst and analy-
sand to conscious incest readily reported, a critical shift in the meaning
of seduction that is ignored by the continuist arguments. And we see
him almost blame his early patients, as if they had misinformed him
about their history, rather than acknowledging that he had come to dis-
believe his own reconstructions.
The 1933 passage continues: “And now we find the phantasy of
seduction once more in the pre-Oedipus prehistory of girls; but the
seducer is regularly the mother. Here, however, the phantasy touches
the ground of reality, for it was really the mother who by her activities
over the child’s bodily hygiene inevitably stimulated, and perhaps even
roused for the first time, pleasurable sensations in her genitals” (p.
185
120). This is another instance of an unacknowledged shift in the con-
cept of seduction, made even more explicit a few years later in the
posthumous “Outline” when Freud says the mother, “by the care of the
child’s body, becomes its first seducer” (1940, p. 188).
Garcia (1987) appeals to these passages as further support for the
argument that Freud did not abandon concern with seduction, suggest-
ing that someone who attached weight to experiences others might
regard as trivial—such as a mother’s ministrations to her child—would
“surely . . . not disregard the traumatic effects of an actual assault”
( p. 457). But what does it mean to use the same word to designate
an adult’s sexual abuse of a child, a mother’s pleasurable and pleasure-
giving care of her child’s body, and (in the Wolf Man, for example) a
three-year-old boy’s flirtatiousness with an adult woman? Rather than
showing Freud’s continued concern with incest, this is a terminological
diffusion amounting to a sleight-of-hand by which the abuse of power
in sexual abuse of children is glossed over.
Two years earlier, Freud (1931) had appealed to the mother-as-
seducer as another explanation for fantasies of paternal incest: “The
fact that the mother thus unavoidably initiates the child into the phallic
phase is, I think, the reason why, in phantasies of later years, the father
so regularly appears as the sexual seducer. When the girl turns away

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from her mother, she also makes over to her father her introduction into
sexual life” (p. 238). Here Freud has traveled far indeed from his
seduction theory: a girl’s seduction by her father has now been located
as a fantastic elaboration of a mother’s care for her infant.
Another continuist claim is that Freud did not abandon incest as an
etiological determinant, but realized that the role of fantasy must in
some way be added to the causal formula: not just incest, but incest
interacting with fantasy. Lear (1996) suggests that Freud did not give
up attention to the impact of seduction but rather revised his episte-
mology: “Abandoning the seduction theory is, fundamentally, aban-
doning the idea that citing any actual event could be the end of one’s
psychological-explanatory activity. One needs to know how that event
(or nonevent) is taken up into a person’s imaginative life; how it is
metabolized in fantasy” (p. 676). According to Lear, abandoning the
seduction theory means the realization that “reality is always reality for
a subject.”
As I have noted, the seduction theory does not claim that citing an
actual event is a sufficient explanation for anything. It is a theory about
186
how unconscious incest symbolizes itself in physical fantasies and
other symptoms. Still, there is no doubt that Freud’s early formulations
on seduction suffer from lack of adequate appreciation of the role of
fantasy in elaborating events, and in the process of symbolization itself.
But we do not see Freud coming to amplify his understanding of the
effects of seduction as mediated through fantasy as we would if Lear’s
interpretation were persuasive. Freud did not apply his new and more
sophisticated etiological understanding to incest in particular.
In Freud’s late essay, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), he
revives an underlying idea of the seduction theory that symptoms,
even delusions, may represent a kernel of “historical truth” (p. 267),
now adding that they are distorted versions of the past. Freud self-
consciously recalls his early theorizing through repetition of his
formulation of suffering from reminiscences. This would seem to
have been the ideal opportunity for Freud to return to a consideration
of seduction, to how incestuous events are preserved and distorted
through being taken up into a person’s imaginative life. But seduction
is not mentioned, which is again testimony through absence to Freud’s
radically reduced concern with seduction.
Another continuist approach, roughly similar to Lear’s, is to
observe that Freud never stopped factoring in the effects of external

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

events, along with those of fantasy. And at numerous points in his writ-
ings, Freud does argue for the idea of what he calls the “complemental
series”: either constitution alone (including fantasy-producing drives)
or accidental factors alone could determine psychopathology, given
sufficient intensity, or these factors could work together in various
ratios in codetermining an outcome (see, e.g., Freud 1916–1917, 1939).
Furman and Marans (1988) link the observation that Freud con-
tinued to refer to external events as causative to the question of the
abandonment of the seduction theory: “Freud’s well-known letter
to Fliess of September 21, 1897, came as no surprise. He had ceased
to view the young child’s psyche as an instinctual blank and began to
devote his investigative genius to the exploration of the drives in child-
hood. . . . Neither then, nor at any later point, did this imply that Freud
discounted the significance of external influences, but from this period
on, he viewed them as interacting with the child’s personality, rather
than merely acting upon it” (p. 758).
The implication is again that there was no real loss in the aban-
donment of the seduction theory, but that Freud simply revised and
187
improved his theory by coming to understand the interaction of drives
and environment. But the argument is a non sequitur, implicitly rewrit-
ing the seduction theory as if it were a theory about external events
in general, when it was a theory about unconscious infantile incest in
particular. Where after the seduction theory does Freud discuss a case
of unconscious infantile incest interacting with constitution?
Further, in the direction of Freud’s thought marked out by the
notion of the complemental series, incest takes its theoretical place
again in the democracy of trauma of the Breuer period, as one of any
number of accidental factors that may play a role in neurotogenesis. It
does not follow from the fact that seduction is not the only neuroto-
genic factor that it is not of particular or distinctive significance. The
specificity of incest as a pathogenic experience, which was central to
the meaning of the seduction theory, has dropped out.
A metapsychological bias that led Freud away from his particular
interest in incest is his emphasis on the economic factor. Freud (1939)
explicitly links the idea of complemental series to an economic con-
ception of neurotogenesis. “If we may assume that the experience
acquires its traumatic character only as a result of a quantitative fac-
tor—that is to say, that in every case it is an excess in demand that is
responsible for an experience evoking unusual pathologic reactions—

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then we can easily arrive at the expedient of saying that something acts
as a trauma in the case of one constitution but in the case of another
would have no such effect. . . . After mentioning this, we can disregard
the distinction between traumatic and non-traumatic aetiologies . . . ”
(p. 73). Here Freud equalizes the impact of spontaneous infantile sexu-
ality and events of seduction, since all that matters is the quantity of
stimulation, whatever its source.
Freud’s original emphasis on the importance of seduction recog-
nized that the form and nature of the experience of incest is significant,
not just its economic effect. It is in the context of presenting his seduc-
tion theory that Freud, on one of less than a handful of occasions in his
entire opus, shows sympathy for the victims of incest and insight into
the nature of the experience of incest. “For the idea of these infantile
sexual scenes is very repellent to the feelings of a sexually normal indi-
vidual; they include all the abuses known to debauched and impotent
persons. . . . All the singular conditions under which the ill-matched
pair conduct their love-relations—on the one hand the adult, who can-
not escape his share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed by a
188
sexual relationship, and who is yet armed with complete authority and
the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the
uninhibited satisfaction of his moods, and on the other hand the child,
who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary will, who is pre-
maturely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to every sort
of disappointment, and whose performance of the sexual activities
assigned to him is often interrupted by his imperfect control of his nat-
ural needs—all these grotesque and tragic incongruities reveal them-
selves as stamped upon the later development of the individual and of
his neurosis, in countless permanent effects which deserve to be traced
in the greatest detail. Where the relation is between two children, the
character of the sexual scenes is none the less of the same repulsive
sort, since every such relationship between children postulates a previ-
ous seduction of one of them by an adult” (1896a, pp. 214–215).
Here Freud shows understanding that incest is a function of power,
of a tragic incongruity of power, an understanding that cannot be
encompassed by an economic orientation but rather has to do with the
form and meaning of the incestuous relation. This insight of the seduc-
tion theory could have opened up to an entire phenomenology of the
experience of incest, but these possibilities were abandoned along with
the seduction theory.

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

I repeat my contention that a careful reading of Freud shows that

there is a clear tendency in his work to turn away not only from the uni-
versalization of the seduction theory, but from any concern whatever
with early parent-child incest. However, it would be wrong to absolu-
tize this tendency in Freud.
Consider the following passage from the posthumous “Outline of
Psycho-analysis” (Freud 1940): Analytic experience has convinced us
of the complete truth of the assertion so often to be heard that the child
is psychologically father to the adult and that the events of his first
years are of paramount importance for his whole later life. It will thus
be of special interest to us if there is something that may be described
as the central experience of this period of childhood. 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 children (brothers
or sisters) slightly their seniors, and, what we should not expect, their
being deeply stirred by seeing or hearing at first hand sexual behavior
between adults. . . . It is easy to confirm the extent to which such
189
experiences arouse a child’s susceptibility and force his own sexual
urges into certain channels from which they cannot afterwards depart”
(p. 187). The result, Freud says, may be neurosis, perversion, or the
total unmanageability of the sexual function.
Eissler cites this passage—and only this one—as convincing proof
that Freud did not deny the reality or pathogenic impact of seduction.
This is a prime example of the problems of quoting Freud pars pro toto
and of reading him polemically. As I’ve shown, Freud says a number of
different and contrary things after the formal seduction theory, which
are simply ignored by Eissler and others.
Further, even this passage involves complexities. It certainly seems
to include a representation of the central conception of the seduction
theory—the pathogenic effect of infantile incest by adult caretakers. It
shows that Freud never completely elided this idea in his thinking.
However, as the passage continues, Freud places the accent elsewhere:
“However instructive cases of this kind may be, a still higher degree
of interest must attach to the influence of a situation which every child
is destined to pass through, and which follows inevitably from the fac-
tor of the prolonged period during which a child is cared for by other
people and lives with his parents. I am thinking of the Oedipus com-
plex . . . ” (p. 187). It is in fact the oedipus complex that is the central

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experience of early childhood that Freud has in mind, not actual seduc-
tions, as Eissler falsely implies. The greater interest goes to oedipal
desire and, by implication, to fantasied seduction. What authorizes this
greater interest?
To understand this, we must turn to another metapsychological idea
that underwrote Freud’s loss of interest in actual infantile incest, one
that centers around the idea of primal fantasies. Freud proposed that
three fantasies—the observation of parental sexual intercourse, the
threat of castration, and the seduction of children by adults—are uni-
versal human fantasies (Freud 1915, 1916–1917, 1918, 1939).
Here is a key text from one of the Introductory Lectures: “The
only impression we gain is that these events of childhood are somehow
demanded as a necessity, that they are among the essential elements of
a neurosis. If they have occurred in reality, so much to the good; but if
they have been withheld from reality, they are put together from hints
and supplemented by phantasy. The outcome is the same, and up to
the present we have not succeeded in pointing to any dif ference in
the consequences, whether phantasy or reality has had the greater share
190
in these events of childhood” (Freud 1916–1917, p. 370). At times
(including elsewhere in this lecture) Freud argued that seduction scenes
are fantasies. Here he argues that it makes no difference whether they
are fantasied or real. So when Hanly says “there is nothing in Freud’s
writings to suggest that he was indifferent . . . to the difference between
phantasy and reality” (1986, p. 517), he has overlooked not only this
text but a major metapsychological thrust of Freud’s work.
Garcia (1987) argues that the change in Freud’s theorizing after the
seduction theory is not a disavowal of the psychopathogenic potential
of real incest but rather amounts to Freud’s accomplishment of realiz-
ing that psychic scenes of seduction could be caused either by fantasy
or by actual seduction: “The discovery that some of the traumatic
scenes related by hysterics had not actually occurred in no way detracted
from their psychic significance . . . the importance lying essentially in
their capacity to generate the relevant psychic scenes” (p. 463). Thus,
Garcia’s view of the seduction theory recapitulates Freud’s history—a
move beyond the seduction theory that minimizes interest in the dif-
ference between incest and seduction fantasy and the sort of psychic
scene involved in each case.
Freud (1916–1917) refers these primal fantasies to phylogenetic
heritage, supposing that they were “once real occurrences in the

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

primaeval times of the human family, and that children in their phan-
tasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric
truth” (p. 371). What an individual history does not instantiate of these
transcendental fantasies or fantasy-categories is made up for in fantasy.
We see that “fantasy” is being used here in two related but different
ways. On the one hand, it refers to the categorical primal fantasies,
which transcend time (or all but “the first time”). On the other hand, it
refers to particular exemplars of these categories, part of the psychic
life history of particular people. “All that we find in the prehistory of
neuroses is that a child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience
where his own experience fails him. He fills in the gaps in individual
truth with prehistoric truth” (Freud 1918, p. 97).
With this, Freud approaches a kind of transcendental argument, the
view of these universal fantasies as conditions for the possibility of any
particular sexual life (see Laplanche and Pontalis 1968). And that is why
they have the “greater interest.” We may link the idea of the universality
of seduction to Freud’s project to ground seduction in oedipal wishes,
in childrens’ unconscious sexual wishes for their parents. In Freud’s
191
psychic world, children imagine that they have been seduced, or make use
of actual seduction, as the expression of a wish; as a way to disown their
desire through projection; as a way to negate their oedipal exclusion.
To my mind, there are two significant movements occurring in this
metapsychology. On the one hand, Freud is thinking of human sexuality
as necessarily constituted by categorical ideas of seduction, castration,
and primal scene, of certain basic sexual wounds that constitute us.
These wounds, these faults, are our fate, and the relation each of us
has to them shapes the story of our life. We may envision the particular
categories differently. But this is a profound turn of thought, in which
what started as an investigation of a particular neuropathology, and then
psychopathology, opens up to an illumination of what it is to be a per-
son. In this sense, as analysts, what we interpret are the ways people
live with the conditions of being human—the ways we suffer them,
evade them, and, one hopes, find generative ways to make them our
own. It is telling, I think, that Freud (1939) quotes a poet, Goethe, in
order to convey his meaning: “What thou hast inherited from thy
fathers, acquire it to make it thine” (p. 207). Psychoanalytic experience
continually reaffirms the truth of this perspective.
On the other hand, even as Freud turned toward the human wound-
edness that is sexuality itself, he at the same time turned away from

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incest, from this grave wound to sexuality. Incest is absorbed into

seduction. Incest or fantasy of incest, the outcome is the same. Here
we see the inability to tell the difference of September 21 transformed
into indifference to this difference, into the conclusion that it is a differ-
ence that makes no difference. As Freud himself put it so memorably
in 1906, “infantile sexual traumas” were in a sense replaced by the
“infantilism of sexuality” (p. 275). Even more, infantile sexual traumas
were occluded by a sexuality conceived as structurally traumatic.
It is of course an error, a false disjunction, to think that the con-
ception of a categorically wounded sexuality or of the power of
fantasy invalidates the significance of incest, or the significance of the
difference between real incest and fantasied seduction. Masson’s
mistake was to think that the fact of incest in itself makes a betrayal out
of the conception of infantile sexuality and oedipal wishes. Now we
see a similar error in reverse.
The mistaken idea that the conception of a categorically wounded
sexuality invalidates the significance of incest continues in contempo-
rary psychoanalysis. For example, in 1989 Christopher Bollas offered
192
what I take to be some of the most compelling psychoanalytic thinking
we have seen on incest. (More on this shortly.) But then in Hysteria,
published in 2000, he writes with apparent scorn for psychoanalytic
interest in incest, because “sexuality-in-itself . . . is the agency of
trauma, all by its fearsome self ” (p. 14). In this way, he repeats Freud’s
movement away from traumas to sexuality to the trauma of sexuality,
and repeats the enactment of a false disjunction.
Is there somehow a tendency for incest to slide away under the sig-
nification of “sexuality itself ”?

INCEST AND THE CAPACITY FOR FANTASY

The continuist claim is that Freud persisted in attending to the sig-

nificance of real seduction after 1897. I have shown that this claim
disregards significant shifts in the very meaning of seduction: Freud’s
tendency to elide adult incest of children, replaced by seductions among
children, and to elide unconscious infantile incest, which requires
psychoanalytic reconstruction, replaced by seductions at or near con-
sciousness and from later life. I have also shown that at times Freud
clearly reduced seduction to fantasy, that he turned away from interest
in the phenomenology of incest, and that he erased, as a matter of

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

metapsychology, the value of the difference between real and fantasied

seduction. Freud, for the most part, did abandon the passionate con-
cerns of his early theorizing on seduction.
In this final section, I turn to another concern. Recall Freud’s 1925
statement that mistaking fantasies of seduction for real events could
have had “fatal consequences” for his whole psychoanalytic project.
Garcia (1987) says of this that the “reason why adherence to the seduc-
tion theory would have ‘proved fatal’ to psycho-analysis had nothing
to do with belief or disbelief per se in the occurrence of childhood
seductions. Rather, it concerned its potential for preventing the psycho-
analytic investigation of infantile sexuality” (p. 466). I have already
shown that this comment of Freud’s had everything to do with disbelief
in the occurrence of childhood seductions.
But what of the other point, that a focus on actual incest could dis-
tract from the psychoanalytic investigation of infantile sexuality? This
has been a persistent concern in psychoanalytic literature, from Freud
himself through Anna Freud (as reported by Masson 1984, p. 113) to
contemporary times (see, e.g., Garcia 1987; Grubrich-Simitis 1988). It
193
seems that there is a tendency among psychoanalysts to believe that
attention to the impact of incest risks compromising the distinctive
psychoanalytic focus on infantile sexuality and the power of wishes.
I disagree. In fact, I contend that if Freud had sustained the speci-
fic interests of the seduction theory—the difference between real and
fantasied seduction, parent-child incest, unconscious infantile incest—
along with his revolutionary understanding of fantasy, he would have
been in a position to learn even more about infantile sexuality.
Fortunately, after decades of neglect, we now have a rich and
ever developing psychoanalytic literature on incest and the damage it
causes. I will be referring to this literature in what follows, but a full
consideration of it is well outside my scope here. My aim is not to add
to this literature, but to place it in the context of the history of the
seduction theory and of the logic of the theory’s place in psychoanalytic
theory as a whole.
The three-to-five-year-old wishes for his fantasied version of geni-
tal possession of his parents, which is in the form of genital possession
that can be imagined by an oedipal-age child. And that is not a fantasy
of adult sexual activity in its form. In that sense, the child’s wish can
never come true, as any actual sexual activity between him and his
parents will be some permutation of adult desire. But in an even deeper

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sense, as soon as a child’s oedipal-sexual wishes come to reality, they

are no longer his wishes. Oedipal wishes are satisfying only as wishes.
Perhaps we can say that oedipal wishes are not primary process wishes,
driving toward immediate satisfaction. They are a certain sort of
secondary process wish, which of course would be incoherent in
Freud’s terms. But we can think of them as secondary process wishes,
insofar as they require deferral and displacement in order for their
satisfaction to be satisfying. And, with deferral in time and the matura-
tion of sexual capacity that comes with it, they will no longer be the
same wishes. Reality cannot satisfy these wishes. It can only traumatize
them, re-form them as traumatic.
A rough but ready indicator of this issue, and Freud’s failure to
understand it, is to be found in Dora’s case (Freud 1905a). It seems
quite plausible that Dora loved Herr K, that she wished for him, let us
say, in the way an adolescent girl might wish for the handsome friend
of her father. But Herr K’s advances did not propose the satisfaction of
Dora’s wish, but rather constituted its undoing. Freud finds it incom-
prehensible that Dora felt traumatized by K’s propositions, since she
194
loved him. But it was just because she loved him that his propositions
were traumatic. As an adolescent girl with romantic fantasies about an
adult man, she needed the freedom to wish, safe from the propositions
of reality.
Oedipal wishes are imaginations of the future, of a future when
these wishes can be transformed into adult desires and their satisfaction
can be satisfying. Bollas makes a related point in Hysteria about the
need for desire to “accept a deferral” (p. 36). However, perhaps due to
his apparent hostility in 2000 to psychoanalytic concern with sexual
abuse, he does not seem to see how the nature of oedipal wishes, as
wishes for something that can happen only in the future, illuminates
precisely the trauma of incest. The premature arrival of the sexual
future that incest constitutes is a fundamental form of the traumatic. To
equate the outcomes of seduction fantasy and event as Freud did after
the seduction theory ignores the temporality of oedipal wishing, its fun-
damental future-tense quality.
In addition to this temporal violation, incest involves a topographic
violation of oedipal wishing, an idea Bollas beautifully developed in
his 1989 work. In a proper topography, a child’s wish moves from its
body to its psyche, and then into the world for age-appropriate gratifi-
cations. Incest turns this around. Instead of oedipal wish moving into

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 DID FREUD ABANDON THE SEDUCTION THEORY?

the world to animate it on the child’s terms, oedipal reality invades the
child’s mind and body to satisfy adult desire. And this reversal easily
results in a dread of wishing and dreaming, as these processes no longer
feel safe enough “to escape the penetrations of reality” (p. 175). The
child may feel that wishing has made it true. The difference between
wish and reality, dream and reality, may become undecidable or per-
niciously confused. And the loss of that difference is an attack on the
very foundation of the psyche. (On this point, see also Shengold 1979;
Huizenga 1990; Blum 1996).
Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) suggest that a return to the seduc-
tion theory is dangerous because it implies a return to the presexual
child. I propose that a version of the seduction theory is critical pre-
cisely because children are sexual, have oedipal wishes, and require
adults to protect their wishes from premature and invasive arrivals of
reality.
The loss of confidence in the difference between wish and reality
and in the safety of dreaming is often accentuated in incest by the
disavowal of the perpetrator. Incest typically occurs in secret, at night,
195
in the twilight between waking and dreaming, a ready host for an attack
on reality: “It’s not my face you are seeing, honey,” as Slavin (1997)
personif ies it ( p. 227). The incestuous system, we might say, tends
to support negative hallucination in the child’s psyche just where the
capacity for perception, for reality testing, should be finding support.
An attack on the perceivability of incest tends to be an intrinsic aspect
of the experience. And the effect of the sort of systematic disavowal
that incest tends to involve is not just a disturbance in memory for the
incestuous events in particular. It often affects the function of memory
itself, the very capacity for representing one’s experience at all, and
therefore may invoke in the victim pernicious doubt in the reliability of
his or her mind. (See, e.g., Ferenczi 1949; Shengold 1979; Kramer 1983;
Slavin 1997; Parens 1997.)
This is an insight Freud (1986) was in the neighborhood of per-
ceiving in his 1897 encounter with the tenacious resistance of the
“secret of childhood experiences” (p. 284) to becoming conscious. But
instead he shifted his focus from infantile incest to later, more con-
scious events, events more likely to be processed by an intact mind than
to figure into the deformation of mind itself. Grubrich-Simitis (1988),
without noticing this shift in Freud, makes up a motto for him: “The
traumatic is always self-evident.” She suggests that Freud wisely and

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 Karin Ahbel-Rappe

determinedly held this position to keep focused on “the uncanny, threat-

ening inner world” that he had discovered (p. 26). But this is again a
false disjunction, a false disjunction of the uncanny. When Freud
turned to the uncanny inner world, he turned away from the uncanny
world of incest that he first discovered and its particular effects on
the inner world.
The act of incest, because of its perversion of the temporality and
topography of wishing and the systematic disavowal of reality that it
tends to involve, has the potential to damage the very capacity of mind
of which seduction fantasies are one expression. In that sense, Freud
made a sort of category mistake when he put seduction fantasies and
events of seduction on equal footing, confusing an event that impacts
a capacity with a function of that capacity. And again the error is not
merely of historical interest. Mary Target (1998), for example, asks
why “pressure for clarity [about whether an event really occurred or
not] only seems to apply in the area of sexual abuse”; why, she asks,
is the analyst not required to say whether a patient really had a depressed
mother, really was left alone too much, or really was very close to her
196
grandmother who died when she was very young? (p. 1020). Pressure
for clarity regarding sexual abuse is a complex issue, to be sure. But
I propose it cannot be thought through adequately without recognition
of a distinctive quality of incest relative to other events—namely, its
very impact on functions of mind including fantasizing, reality test-
ing, and feeling clear about things. Incest, by its nature, requires a
different kind of epistemological interest, and its study funds a par-
ticular sort of psychoanalytic knowledge.
Reality is always reality for a subject, a most basic psychoanalytic
orientation. But a different psychoanalytic question concerns how a
person becomes a subject for reality, so to speak, a subject that is ready
for reality, ready to represent, to dream, to fantasize it. This is psycho-
analytic territory that is illuminated in a unique way by the study of
incest. Freud marked out and started down a trail of investigation into
the nature of the experience of infantile incest and its impact on the
human psyche, and then abandoned this direction for the most part.
When we take up this path, we discover that it need not detract from
an understanding of fantasy and its role in psychic life. Rather, it leads
to the heart of the Freudian psyche, to a deepened understanding of
the capacity for oedipal fantasy and the way it can be damaged.

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