NPPF -- Doubts on the incest business

[Glenn Scheper]

> Didn't psychiatrists--following Freud's example--tend to
> pass tales of such things off as screen memories and
> fantasies deriving from psychoanalytic theory?
> It was only in the seventies or later when Freud's so
> called rejection of the seduction theory was brought
> forcefully into question and Oprah and Roseanne took up the
> challenge with a vengeance that this type of child abuse
> moved to the front burner of national interest.

I have _The Freud Reader_ out under my car seat,
so I can read a few pages on each commute, where
my contemplation does not pique the wife's wrath.
I went to Walmart and came back with a few notes:

Freud, 40, presented _The Aetiology of Hysteria_
giving his infant seduction theory in April 1896.

	---

"We have learned that no hysterical symptom
can arise from a real experience alone,
but that in every case the memory of earlier
experiences awakened in association to it
plays a part in causing the symptom."
...

"I therefore put forward the thesis that
at the bottom of every case of hysteria
there are one or more occurrences of
premature sexual experience,
occurrences which belong to the
earliest years of childhood
but which can be reproduced
through the work of psycho-analysis
in spite of the intervening decades.

I believe that this is an important finding,
the discovery of the caput Nili
{source of the Nile} in neuropathology."

	---

1.5 years later, he abandoned this "seduction theory",
writing to Fliess that he has understood the gripping
power of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex: the tragedy enshrines
the universal experience of the boy loving his mother
and being jealous of his father.

	---

Now I recall to your attention my often testimony,
that in the day of the onset of my acute psychosis,
I was intent on killing my father (but discussed it
with him) and to rape my mother (but was frozen up).

I have since been looking for the roots of my ideas
in religion, mythology, and a few poets and authors.
I have also latched onto an infant seduction theory,
but allow that there might arise better hypotheses.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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