Freud's Mother, Ferenczi, and the Seduction Theory*

Ferenczi's paper, “The Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child,” presented at the International Psycho-Analytic Congress at Weisbaden in 1932 was the final summing up of his beliefs before his death less than a year later. In it he reaffirmed his “recent stronger emphasis on traumatic factors, which have been undeservedly neglected of late in the pathogenesis of the neurosis.” Throughout his life, Ferenczi had focused on the interaction of both fantasy and external reality. He held this conviction so strongly that he was willing to risk the disruption of his deeply valued, close friendship with Freud. Freud opposed the presentation of this paper, having abandoned his Seduction Theory in 1897, and since then focused primarily on intrapsychic drives and fantasies.

I would like to consider in this paper why Freud abandoned his Seduction Theory in the first place. This topic has been of great interest to me for a number of years. In my paper, “Interpersonal Factors in Hysteria: Freud's Seduction Theory and the Case of Dora” (Slipp, 1977), and in my recent book (Slipp, 1984), I question his abandonment of the Seduction Theory and imply that Freud's main conflict was with his mother. My hypothesis is that Freud abandoned the Seduction Theory as an attempt to deny the traumatic impact of others, since he could not deal with a pre-Oedipal conflict with his mother.

As evidence to support this hypothesis, I will use another of Ferenczi's (1919) papers as well as one of Freud's dreams and a letter to Fliess. In the dream Freud (1900) had at the time of his father's funeral in October, 1896, he saw a sign, like a printed “No