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Sigmund Freud moved away from the seduction theory, which I would like to call the overt theory of seduction, in or around 1897 when he began to view seduction more introspectively.1 It was this introspective examination of instinctual desires which led to the discovery of the Oedipus complex, wherein the child wrongly imagines a nonexistent seduction resultant from projected wish fulfillments of lustful impulses towards the mother during that psychosexual stage of development. However, this suggestion that seduction was in fact imagined is not exactly universally accurate. I would like to postulate that Freud's original belief in the recalled seductions of his patients was in fact closer to the truth, i.e., that a type of seduction really did occur in certain but not all situations. I would like to term this type of seduction covert, which incorporates the original seduction theory and draws blood from the overlapping oedipal tendencies prevailing in complexes advanced by Freud in early manuscripts2 as being universally existent in certain defined childhood maturational periods. The covert seduction theory suggests that the parent, psychologically rather than physically, intentionally rather than accidentally, seduces the child, wherein the feeling of being seduced is not imagined, but neither is it fully realized consciously. The child can be viewed as a tentative witness to his own uncertain victimization.
When Freud moved away from the seduction theory in favor of the oedipal theorizations he did not completely lose track of the elusive meaning of seduction. He still recognized that there could be mental (accidental or innocent) seduction without complete traumatic (intentional) physical seduction. He wrote in the “Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society”3
But indeed, there is a grain of truth contained in this fantasy (which) lies in the fact that the father, by way of his innocent caresses in earliest childhood, has actually
Page 247awakened the little girl's sex