Sigmund Freud, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The charge, as Masson pressed it, is that I retreated from an uncomfortable truth for reasons of cowardice or social ambition. Let me say plainly what the record shows, because the record is not what the charge assumes. I believed the stories my patients told. Under the technical procedure I was using at the time, the majority of them reproduced scenes from childhood in which they had been sexually seduced by some grown-up person, and with female patients the seducer was almost always the father.1
I kept my critical faculty deliberately in abeyance, wanting to remain receptive to the novelties the material was pressing upon me daily. That was not cowardice; it was method. When I was finally obliged to recognize that these scenes had not in all cases taken place — that some were phantasies my patients had constructed, or that I had perhaps forced upon them by my technique — my confidence in that technique suffered a severe blow, and I said so.1
But what I discovered in the ruins of the seduction theory was not nothing. It was infantile sexuality itself — the recognition that the sexual function begins at the start of life and leaves its mark on childhood long before puberty, a finding that met more universal indignation than almost anything else I published.2 The child has wishes, and those wishes generate phantasies that follow a remarkably stable pattern: seduction, observation of parental intercourse, the threat or fact of castration.
The uniformity of these phantasies across patients is what pressed me toward the concept of primal phantasies — a phylogenetic inheritance, the individual reaching beyond his own thin experience into the prehistory of the species.3 Now: did I suppress the reality of abuse? No. I said, with some care, that analysts must not be misled into attributing sexual misuse of children by their nearest male relatives solely and always to phantasy.4
Most analysts had treated cases in which such relations were real and could be proved beyond doubt.4 I never denied this. What I denied was that real seduction was the universal cause of hysteria I had first supposed. The two claims are entirely separable, and conflating them — as the accusation does — produces a false picture. Phantasy is a cause in its own right; so is actual seduction; the neurosis makes no clean distinction between them, and to this day the clinical results have been indistinguishable depending on which predominated.5
There is a further complication the accusation tends to pass over. Childhood memories are not simply preserved impressions; they are consolidated and remodelled, typically at puberty, in a process analogous to the way a nation constructs legends about its early history.6 The individual, as he grows up, effaces the recollection of his auto-erotic activities by elevating their memory-traces to the level of object-love — which is why these phantasies abound in seductions and assaults where the facts may have been confined to auto-erotic activity and the caresses or punishments that stimulated it.6
This is not a mechanism invented to discredit patients. It is a finding about how memory itself works in the service of wish. The seduction-phantasy has, moreover, a specific motive: the child covers the auto-erotic period, where there was no actual seduction, with the phantasy of seduction — sparing himself the shame of onanism by imagining an object for his desires in that early period.4
That is a psychological observation, not a verdict that the patient is lying or that real abuse does not occur. The two things — the psychological function of the phantasy and the reality of abuse — coexist, and an analyst who cannot hold both simultaneously will do harm in either direction: dismissing real testimony as fantasy, or accepting fantasy as literal history.
What I will grant, because the texts support it, is that the doctrine of psychical reality can be misused — turned into an instrument for disbelieving genuine testimony. That misuse is not licensed by anything I wrote, but it has happened, and the analyst owes the patient a discrimination the theory does not automatically supply. The iron rule of the neurosis, as I put it, is that these childhood experiences — real or constructed — are somehow necessary to it; if reality withheld them, the imagination supplies them, and the result is the same.5
That finding was hard-won. It was not a retreat from the consulting room. It was what the consulting room, listened to long enough, actually showed.
For a time I held that hysteria was caused by an actual event — a sexual seduction in childhood, later repressed.7 I abandoned that theory, and I have never concealed that I did so, or why. The seductions my patients reported could not all have occurred; the fathers accused were too numerous and too respectable, and the analyses that reconstructed such scenes did not reliably cure.
What I discovered in the ruins of the seduction theory was more important than the theory itself: that the reports pointed not always to real events but often to infantile wishes and fantasies invested with the force of memory — that the child has a sexual life, and that psychical reality, the wish, has a power in the neurosis that is independent of whether the event occurred.891011
I did not deny that real seductions happen; I said that they were not the universal cause I had first supposed, and that fantasy is a cause in its own right. To read this as a cowardly retreat from an uncomfortable truth is to miss the discovery: infantile sexuality, and the reality of the wish, are not an evasion of the child's inner life but the recognition of it.
When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced upon them, I was for some time completely at a loss. My confidence alike in my technique and in its results suffered a severe blow.The Question of Lay Analysis
I found myself faced by the fact of infantile sexuality—once again a novelty and a contradiction of one of the strongest of human prejudices... Few of the findings of psycho-analysis have met with such universal contradiction or have aroused such an outburst of indignation as the assertion that the sexual function starts at the beginning of life.The Question of Lay Analysis
I am of the opinion that these primal phantasies—so I should like to term these, and certainly some others also—are a phylogenetic possession. In them the individual reaches out beyond his own life, into the experiences of antiquity, where his own experience has become all too rudimentary.A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
As a matter of fact, you must not be misled in attributing sexual misuse of the child by its nearest male relatives solely and always to phantasy. Most analysts have probably treated cases in which such relations were real and could be proved beyond doubt.A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
We cannot avoid the impression that such experiences of childhood are in some way necessary to the neurosis, that they are claimed by its iron rule. If they exist in reality, then well and good, but if reality has withheld them they are constructed from suggestions and supplemented by the imagination. The result is the same, and to this day we have been unable to trace any difference in the results, whether fancy or fact played the larger part in these childish occurrences.A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
People's 'childhood memories' are only consolidated at a later period, usually at the age of puberty; and that this involves a complicated process of remodelling, analogous in every way to the process by which a nation constructs legends about its early history... in constructing phantasies about his childhood the individual sexualizes his memories.Chapter I — Extracts From The Case History
Reserving for a later, more detailed discussion the question whether the retiology of hysteria and the obsessional neurosis is to be regarded as contained in the sexual experiences of childhood, I will return to the form the theory assumed in some short preliminary papers published in the years 1895 and 1896 1 • By emphasizing the retiological factors already inferred, it was possible at that time to contrast the…My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses, p. 276
The theory culminates in the sentence: In a normal vita sexualis no neurosis is possible. If I still consider today this sentence as correct it is really not surprising that after ten years labor on the knowledge of these relations I passed a good way beyond my former point of ^ See Chapter VII, and Zur Aetiologie der Hysterie, Wiener, Klinische Rundschau, 1896.Selected Papers on Hysteria, p. 189
The formulation of infantile sexuality is another of these products, acquired, however, at a much later date; in the early days of tentative investigation by analysis no such thing was thought of. At first one merely remarked that the effect of current experiences had to be traced back to something in the past. Only, 'enquirers often find more than they bargain for'.On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, pp. 299–300
Few of the findings of psychoanalysis have met with such universal contradiction or have aroused such an outburst of indignation as the assertion that the sexual function starts at the beginning of life and reveals its presence by important signs even in childhood. And yet no other finding of analysis can be demonstrated so easily and so completely.The Question of Lay Analysis
It is, moreover, in no way impossible that the little child, so long as he is not credited with any understanding or memory, will, even in families outside the proletariat, become a witness to the sexual act between his parents or some other group-ups, and it cannot be disproved that the child subsequently understands this impression, and may react upon it.A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
One of the most morally charged controversies in the history of psychoanalysis, reopened by Jeffrey Masson's The Assault on Truth (1984), which used Freud's own unpublished correspondence to argue that the abandonment of the seduction theory was a failure of nerve that suppressed the reality of child sexual abuse and set psychoanalysis on a path of blaming victims' fantasies. Masson's charge resonated with the survivor-advocacy movement and the growing recognition of the prevalence of childhood abuse. Freud scholars largely rejected Masson's reading of the motives while acknowledging the enormous consequence of the shift; the later 'recovered memory' controversies of the 1990s gave the dispute a fresh and bitter relevance. The question of what Freud's patients were reporting, and how he understood it, remains contested.