Trauma, Repetition, and Affect

On September 21, 1897, Freud wrote a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess saying that he had changed his mind. Fliess' side of the correspondence has not been preserved, so we have no way of knowing what his reaction to this letter was, but I would be willing to bet that the latter-day readers of Freud's letters have pored over this particular piece of correspondence far more intensively than did Fliess himself, who by most accounts had his own preoccupations.

In this letter, Freud said that he no longer believed in his “neurotica”: that is, he no longer believed that sexual trauma played a major role in the etiology of neurosis. The September 1897 marker is quite arbitrary. His other letters show that he waffled; he was clearly loathe to give up the earlier theory. It is not hard to guess why: there was a clarity, a specificity, and an elegance to the trauma theory; it had its own self-contained theory of etiology, pathogenesis, epigenesis and the requisite therapy. For a man as ambitious and on-the-make as the early Freud, it must have been a bitter pill to give it up. Despite the apparent good spirits with which he gave voice to his new perspective in the 1897 letter, it still took him seven years more before he publicly recanted the trauma theory.

There are those who say that he had it right the first time. Jeffrey Mas-son1 would say that everything that came later was a massive retreat on Freud's part, a cop-out from facing the enormity of what he had known to begin with. Masson has a point. The most painful and difficult perception for anyone—and we all make assaults on truth to avoid it—is the perception of injury at the hands of a parent. But Masson's way of saying this is, to my mind, more assaultive to the truth, or at any rate, to the transitional objects we call truth, than is Freud's. Let me try to say why.

Without everything that followed 1897—and one has to include, here, not only Freud and the orthodoxies, but all the dissident schools, revolutions