Talk:Freud's seduction theory

"Freud's seduction theory"

Probably the most, or best, misunderstood Freudian theory in Victorian anglo-america, maybe especially USA, maybe for ever and forever?? The Father of Spin had much more American success http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

Facts
There are some facts lacking referring to the history of the paper's presentation. Where to insert them best?
 * Austerlitz -- 88.75.72.39 (talk) 21:10, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Freud's seduction theory
I have made no alterations to the paragraphs in the current website, but I have interspersed sections of that account with alternative accounts based on research of recent decades by several Freud scholars who returned to the original documents instead of accepting Freud's later stories. My account is fully referenced. (N.B. I have had three articles published on this topic, in "History of the Human Sciences" (1998), "History of Psychiatry" (2001), "History of Psychology" (2002), now added to the Further Reading section.) Esterson (talk) 14:48, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I have replaced some secondary source references by primary source references (i.e., Freud's own writings). I see no point in citing secondary sources for specific information about Freud's theories, etc, when the original documents are available. Esterson (talk) 08:57, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I have severely modified my recent additions to the webpage, with fuller citing of references. Esterson (talk) 19:11, 10 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Note
 * I have deleted the paragraph quoting from Anny Katan's reminiscence in old age as it is evident that it is a garbled recollection of a mythological story about an 1886 meeting, not that at which Freud presented his talk on "The Aetiology of Hysteria" (1896). See below, under the heading "Additional Information", for a full discussion of the item in question. (Note that Freud's own contemporary report of the 1896 meeting to his friend Wilhelm Fliess contains nothing about his lecture being howled down, only that it received "an icy reception" [Masson, J., (ed. and trans.), 1985, p. 184, letter 26 April 1896]).
 * Esterson (talk) 16:38, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Freud’s reported evidence for the seduction theory
I have left the current paragraph untouched, but added a paragraph presenting a different, fully-referenced, view, based on the examination of the original documents by several Freud scholars. Esterson (talk) 14:53, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I have modified the material I recently added to the webpage. Esterson (talk) 19:14, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Abandonment of the Seduction Theory
I have partially rewritten the first paragraph giving Freud's reasons for abandoning the seduction theory so that his own explanation is given, rather than reasons partially mediated by a secondary source. The secondary references have been replaced by a single primary reference. Esterson (talk) 09:32, 8 September 2008 (UTC)


 * As with several other articles you have edited recently, this is an extremely one-sided and obviously far from neutral account of things. It will need rewriting in order to bring it into accord with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. Skoojal (talk) 10:26, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

It is significant, I think, that Skoojal makes this comment specifically in relation to a paragraph in which I cited and quoted from the primary source, Freud's original document, instead of from secondary sources, as before. As to Skoojal's general comment about my recent additions, and occasional amendments, of other articles, I have taken care to leave untouched previous paragraphs (except where they contain documented factual errors), and provided alternative views. My new paragraphs are fully referenced. Has Skoojal examined these many references, so that he is in a position to judge the validity or otherwise of what they contain? I strongly suspect that Skoojal has read very few, if any, of the references I have given in support of what I have written, and that he is in no position to make the judgement he gives above. Esterson (talk) 12:54, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I have added an alternative view of the judgements in the last paragraph. Esterson (talk) 12:55, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I have added fuller references to the first paragraph. Esterson (talk) 19:17, 10 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I just want to belatedly say that I now see the rationale behind Skoojal's comment above. Thanks to some editors, including Skoojal, I have now come to appreciate the basic rules of Wikipedia, and that some terms (e.g., Original Research) have a specifically Wikipedian meaning. This is why I have rewritten all my recent contributions to accord with Wikipedia regulations. Esterson (talk) 09:01, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Opening paragraphs
"This article does not actually discuss what seduction theory is. Please help by expanding."

In response to this request I have radically amended the first two paragraphs to provide the information required. Esterson (talk) 18:27, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Additional information
"In one of my earliest memories, I was about four years old, maybe a bit younger, and I remember my father coming home in a fury. He was talking to my mother and I didn't understand but kept hearing the word, "Sigmund."  Much later I told my father memory and asked what had been the matter.  He said, "I had been in the Society of Physicians in Vienna, and Freud was going to give a paper on hysteria. He said that hysteria was not a sickness of the body; it was a sickness of the mind and the emotions. He said that the symptoms of hysteria were formed by different sorts of conflicts that a person had, that often these were sexual conflicts and they were all unconscious. He said that if you could bring the conflict to consciousness, the person would lose the symptoms because they could handle the conflict in a different way when it was conscious. The other thing he said was that it is not true that only women are getting hysteria, that he had treated many a man who had hysteria. At that moment the whole Society of Physicians, nearly all men, howled, booed, whistled, screamed, and did not let him finish his lecture." I insert part of this information.
 * by Anny Katan, M.D. 1898-1993:
 * Austerlitz -- 88.75.194.98 (talk) 19:43, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Ludwig Rosenberg, the name of her father -- 88.75.194.98 (talk) 19:43, 17 February 2009 (UTC)


 * On the "Freud's Seduction Theory" Wikipedia page, a paragraph alluding to the above has been added after a report about the 21 April 1896 meeting of the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology at which Freud gave a talk on "The Aetiology of Hysteria". However, Anny Katan's reminiscence makes no sense, for the following reasons:


 * 1. Anny Katan was born in 1898, two years after the meeting in question, so she could not possibly have a genuine recollection from infancy of her father's having come home from the meeting.


 * 2. The 1896 talk was a presentation of Freud's new theory that an unconscious memory of infantile sexual molestation was the source of hysterical symptoms. The above account contains a description of the theory Freud held prior to 1896, not the more specific one announced in the 1896 talk.


 * 3. The 1896 talk was given to the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology, not the Vienna Society of Physicians. Katan seems to be confusing two quite different meetings. In 1886 Freud gave a talk to the Society of Physicians in which the subject matter included male hysteria. He reported this meeting in An Autobiographical Study, but his account of the negative response to his contentions about male hysteria does not mention any abuse as claimed by Katan. (Freud 1920, Standard Edition vol. 20, p. 15) Moreover, Freud's claim that his colleagues denied the existence of male hysteria is contradicted by the published proceedings of the meeting. Freud's official biographer Ernest Jones writes: "The neurologist Rosenthal opened the discussion by remarking that male hysteria, though relatively rare, was well recognized." And whereas Freud wrote that the chairman Bamberger "declared that what I said was incredible", the proceedings show that he actually said "All this is very interesting, but there is nothing new in it." (Jones. E., Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 1 (Hogarth), 1953, pp. 252-53; Ellenberger, H., The Discovery of the Unconscious, 1970, pp. 437-42) In the words of a fairly recent Freud biographer, "The historical record shows there is no truth in [Freud's] account" of the 1886 meeting. (Berger, L., Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision, 2000, p. 84)


 * 4. None of Freud's biographers report a meeting during the period of Katan's infancy at which Freud spoke about male hysteria, a topic he had in any case left well behind by 1900. It is also inconceivable that Freud himself would not have given an account of being howled down and not allowed to finish a lecture had such an event actually happened (not to mention complaining about it at the time in one of his letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess). (The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, ed. and trans. J. M. Masson, 1985)


 * Anny Katan's supposed "memory" and the account she attributes to her father appear to relate to the 1886 meeting transposed to a later time, and is an exaggerated version of Freud's own report, which itself is contradicted by the historical record. This is evidently an illustration of the unreliability of recollections and recyclings of reports, especially when recorded many decades after the event to which they purportedly relate. For this reason I intend to delete the paragraph in question from the "Freud's Seduction Theory" page.


 * N.B. Frank Cioffi (Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience, 1998, p. 40) has documented how Freud's own misleading account of the 1886 meeting has itself been extrapolated to ever more fanciful heights:


 * Another account runs: 'When he was a young man he tried to present to the Vienna Medical society a case of hysteria in a male patient. One of the old greybeards said: "obviously, the young doctor doesn't know his Greek: 'hysteria' means 'womb sickness'." The other members of the society jeered and hooted Freud out of the room, thus preventing him from presenting his evidence.'[99]


 * A much earlier version runs: 'He read a paper to his medical colleagues upon his explorations with Charcot into the hidden reality of the mind through hysteria and hypnosis. When in the course of his report he spoke of cases of hysteria in men, the angry tension exploded in a guffaw. "Has a man a hystero a womb?" they asked, and stalked out of the room.'[100] In one version it is Freud who leaves the room having been hooted and jeered at; in the other it is his indignant and derisive audience who 'stalked' out. Since we have the minutes of this meeting we know that neither happened.


 * 99. Neal Miller, Chairman's Opening Remarks. The Role of Learning in Psychotherapy, Ruth Porter, ed., (J.A. Churchill Ltd., 1968), p. 2.


 * 100. Edwin Embree, Prospecting for Heaven (New York: Viking, 1932).


 * Esterson (talk) 16:36, 28 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Additional note
 * The link to the item about Anny Katan notes that the paragraph quoted above was supplied by her for Volume I of Child Analysis: Clinical, Theoretical, and Applied, which was published in 1990. Her father, Ludwig Rosenberg, died in 1928 (Gay, P., 1988, p. 573). This means that Katan provided her account when she was 92 years old, more than 60 years after the reported incident of her father telling her about Freud supposedly being shouted down at a meeting. It is quite clear from Cioffi's historical research (see above) that the meeting in question was in 1886, when Freud had come from Paris with what he thought was fresh information about male hysteria, only to be told that what he reported was not new. The similarities between the two accounts in the Cioffi quotation above and Katan's account leaves no doubt that they purportedly describe the same event, while the documentary record shows that these accounts are mythological. It is evident that in old age Katan provided a garbled account of the meeting mixing up accurate information about the subject matter with a mythological story that she had picked up (quite possibly from her father, as she says) that circulated later in psychoanalytic circles.
 * Esterson (talk) 16:19, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Izenberg
The section on Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory states that, "Gerald N. Izenberg's essay "Seduced and abandoned: The rise and fall of Freud's seduction theory," part of The Cambridge Companion to Freud, provides a thorough and competent discussion as to the controversy surrounding Freud's abandonment of the Seduction Theory." Izenberg's discussion may be thorough and competent, but such an evaluation requires a source, otherwise it is simply a statement of opinion, and not in accord with WP:NPOV. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 23:00, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Clarity
"According to the theory, a repressed memory of an early childhood sexual abuse or molestation experience was the essential precondition for hysterical or obsessional symptoms, with the addition of an active sexual experience up to the age of eight for the latter."

I'm not sure enough of what the last clause means to clarify this sentence. However, that's better evidence than any that it needs clarifying. I would appreciate it if someone familiar with the topic could do so. Thanks! Exercisephys (talk) 23:42, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Breuer vs. Freud
The so-called "seduction theory" was never originated or held by Freud himself. Rather, it sprung from the mind of his mentor, trained rhinologist Josef Breuer, whilst young Freud, as part of his study of medicine and anatomy, worked as Breuer's assistant, which was the sole reason why Breuer's works on the seduction theory also bore Freud's name, as Breuer's assistant. Freud also never gave any public lecture on it in front of any medical society that supposedly led to a "public outcry" against him. Many authors preferring to buy into Breuer's seduction theory and hence claiming that Freud "abandoned" it due to sheer cowardice or corrupt, sinful patriarchal malice often confuse this with two contemporarily controversial lectures that Freud actually held in Vienna, the first held in the mid-1880s mainly parroting Charcot's views on hysteria (this lecture was controversial because Freud had used the word "hysteria" also for men, without ever mentioning molestation), and the second, held in the early 1900s, being on his original concept of infantile sexuality.

It is also not true that Freud's early letter to Fließ, which summarized the affair with a very brief overview to a friend already educated in medical terms and Freud's studies, would be his only written account of his opposition to Breuer's seduction theory. Freud gave a far more detailled account of the Breuer-Freud controversy which led to their split and eventually to Freud's own development of psychoanalysis in opposition to Breuer in his auto-biographical 1938 Abriß der Psychoanalyse written for the general public, where he precisely lists his three reasons in detail that led him to oppose Breuer's seduction theory:


 * a.) Freud increasingly found tangible evidence in individual cases even logically outruling any potential possibility the supposedly 'recovered' events of childhood molestation could have occured (for instance, patients had never lived with their 'accused' parents),


 * b.) Freud found himself able to most easily 'direct' his adult patients in the highly suggestible state of hypnosis, as was favored by Breuer as method of "uncovering" 'repressed memories', into any recollection of memory he wanted to, even moreso in an entirely boundless manner when he turned to sexual matters, and


 * c.) aspects (such as objects or places) linked to the supposed childhood molestation had not been 'repressed' by his patients and were not perceived by his patients as alarming or frightening on themselves, but in fact frequently even were connoted with positive emotions, partly even very intensely so, in a manner that the patients themselves could not explain.

Freud deduced from a.) and b.) that the unconscious mind tapped into by hypnosis actually knows no distinction between memories of past events and presently induced imagination and that therefore, the unconcious mind easily becomes subject to after-the-fact manipulation of memories and imagination, and by combining this analysis with c.), he concluded that it's personal desires and fantasies that are getting repressed as demanded according to social taboo, even if, as he often maintained, these desires have very different forms and expressions in adulthood than they do during childhood.

As noted by historian of science and medicine Florian Mildenberger in his 2006 monography Beispiel Peter Schult on Germanophone medical and societal attitudes towards paedophilia, Freud did not make the Breuer-Freud controversy public at the time and didn't even discuss it within the Psychoanalytic Society, with the result being that it pretty much cropped up again around 1930 with Sandor Ferenczi's concepts of Identifikation mit dem Aggressor and Sprachverwirrung pretty much repeating Breuer's position. Freud, sr. bowed out at the time, leaving his daughter Anna Freud to respond in her father's tradition and confront Ferenczi with her concept of Identifikation mit dem Angreifer targeted directly at Ferenczi. Soon, Freud, sr. himself followed with his auto-biographical Abriß der Psychoanalyse, where he went into detail on the Breuer-Freud controversy and how it had caused Breuer and Freud to go separate ways.

Now, Anna Freud has often been critizized for overplaying individual and ego psychology while neglecting environmental, societal, and cultural aspects, but noted Materialist and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, who was also a noted Freudian, while he never directly touched upon the Breuer-Freud aka Ferenczi-Freud controversy on "repressed memories" of molestation, indirectly but strongly supported Anna Freud on the issue by ostensibly and frequently adopting her related terminology (Identifikation mit dem Angreifer) in opposition to Ferenczi's (Identifikation mit dem Aggressor), and in some of his essays (Die revidierte Psychoanalyse, Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie, and Theorie der Halbbildung, among others) detailed his reasons for this choice to adopt Anna Freud's model rather than Ferenczi's, mainly by referring to how Anna Freud's concept was more in line with Freud's social and Materialist views of the psychic apparatus being a result of social interaction and conflict, while Ferenczi's concept rather rendered him a regressed conformist rebel (a concept Adorno explained at length in his The Authoritarian Personality), without touching upon the topic of molestation directly. Only within his essay Sexualtabu und Recht heute ("Sexual taboo and the law today"), Adorno came closest to the underlying debate within the Breuer-Freud aka Ferenczi-Freud controversy (and also probably his choice of Anna Freud's vocabulary) as within that essay, while emphasizing that it be far from him to justify the legalization of sex with minors, he openly and at great length and detail compares the socio-psychological motivation to persecute prostitutes, the clients of prostitutes, and paedophiles to that of anti-Semitism, as in that all these forms of societal persecution are based upon the persecutor's repression of their own socially-shunned sexual desires that are hence projected upon minority out-groups by means of a process that he terms pathical (i. e. socially-learned) projection. Adorno's concept of pathical projection was based in equal parts upon Freud's writings as well as Karl Marx's On the Jewish question, wherein Marx posited that anti-Semitism stemmed from gentile Bourgeoisie ideologically projecting the qualities of their own Capitalist Charaktermasken social role of bourgeois individuals upon Jews as scapegoats in a personalizing or "falsely concretist" manner by which it seeks to exorcize the qualities of its own Capitalist system and the Charaktermasken it creates by projecting it upon Jews as the supposed "cause" of Capitalism that the bourgeois class itself fails to comprehend.

Later, Adorno-informed sources (particularly referring to a.) anti-Americanism as forms of anti-Democratism, anti-modernism, anti-liberalism, and of hatred towards emancipatory, scientifically Enlightened humanist reason, b.) to anti-Zionism as a combination of the same motives behind anti-Americanism combined with replacing the Jews as a people with the Jewish state in order to superficially avoid the anti-Semitism label, and c.) to simplistic personalizing conspiracy theories on "banksters" being responsible for Capitalism by their personal own greed, rather than systemic materialistic causes of Capitalist crises due to the Capitalist mode of production) would come to refer to this universal socio-psychological mechanism of pathical projection upon out-groups and outsiders that Adorno had originally described in anti-Semitism (as he'd particularly done in Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Authoritarian Personality, while first extending the concept to also apply to anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism in his essay Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit), and later in other forms of social persecution directed against prostitution and paedophilia, as "structural anti-Semitism" or "secondary anti-Semitism" because as has been posited by Adorno, other socially-shunned out-groups may take the place in the persecutor's mind that in anti-Semitism is held by Jews. --2003:71:4E07:BB09:FC3A:9551:4E36:AD36 (talk) 16:10, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Seduction Theory
What is the meaning 122.53.185.85 (talk) 03:16, 8 March 2023 (UTC)