NPPF -- Doubts on the incest business

[Paul Mackin]

On Thu, 2003-07-31 at 00:17, Glenn Scheper wrote: 
> > 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.
> 

This is my understanding of what happened to the "seduction theory." 

Whether what psycho-analysts believed (if they did follow Freud on this
matter) was responsible for the general lack of interest and belief in
child seduction isn't something I remember having seen written up
anywhere. 

The whole climate of opinion of course changed around 1980 or so. Freud
was accused of being a lying scoundrel. Real (as opposed to fantasy)
child seduction started being taken ultra seriously. As it is taken to
be today.

The name of Freud's chief accuser was Jeffrey Moussaieef Masson, in a
book called The Assault on Truth. Janet Malcolm wrote a series of
articles in the New Yorker highly critical of Masson.

Who knows?

P.

.
---
> 
> 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
> Copyleft(!) Forward freely.
>