What Has Been Done to You, You Poor Child?

Bonomi’s initiative to re-publish in Italy a new edition of Masson’s famous book, The assault on truth, has prompted scholars to reopen a crucial page in the history of psychoanalysis. In light of this revolutionary and controversial etiopathogenetic hypothesis of hysteria, the author of the present contribution examines Freud’s letter to Fliess of December 22, 1897, which follows by a few months the well-known Freudian repudiation of his theory of sexual trauma in childhood (September 21, 1897). The author dwells on the quotation from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which Freud makes at the end of his missive of December 22: “What has been done to you, you poor child?,” uttered by little Mignon. The first edition of the letters to Fliess, edited by Bonaparte, Anna Freud et al., had been purged of this literary note, which the complete version by Masson restored to us (1985). The analysis of the strange figure of Mignon reveals Freud’s remaining doubts regarding the renunciation of seduction theory. It is also surmised that the possible retention of the theory of sexual abuse in childhood could have favored and perhaps anticipated Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex, and the very conception of childhood sexuality.