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ABSTRACT: This paper addresses a pivotal moment in Freudian psychoanalytic history, 1905-1907, which marked an important shift from clinical narratives of sexual trauma that showed symptoms of hysteria and dementia praecox (commonly known today as schizophrenia) to sexual trauma being interpreted as symptom formation attached to infantile sexuality and neurosis. Karl Abraham, a young practicing psychiatrist at the time, observed a correlation between many patients who displayed symptoms of dementia praecox and those who provided clinical narratives of sexual assault. Within the space of two papers written in 1907, however, and with Freud as his new mentor, Abraham shifted from pursuing this line of inquiry to adopting Freud's developing views on the link between sexual trauma, infantile sexuality, and neurosis. I suggest that Abraham's first paper, which integrates elements of Freud's seduction theory, actually serves to reveal Freud's conflicted position on his seduction theory that he had allegedly renounced in 1897.
In An Autobiographical Study, Freud reflects on how his seduction theory nearly destroyed his future in psychoanalysis:
I must mention 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 pressure of the technical procedure2 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.... I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies.... I had in fact stumbled for the first time upon the Oedipus complex, which was later to assume such an overwhelming importance.3
At least three implicit but contradictory conclusions can be drawn from Freud's statement: 1) at one point in Freud's career, he believed his female patients' accounts that they had been seduced (i.e., sexually abused), typi- cally by their fathers;4 2) daughters fantasized about being seduced by their fathers, which was to become a natural and necessary feature of the Oedipus complex; and 3) it is implausible that so many fathers are capable of committing incestuous acts against their daughters. Knowing what we know today about...