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In 1896 Freud published a theory of the causation of hysteria which later was called “the seduction theory.” He made its validity dependent on the rule of specificity and the rule of limitation.
The rule of specificity predicated that all adults suffering from neurotic psychopathology—that is, hysteria or obsessional—compulsive neurosis—had been sexually abused prior to age 10. How rigorously Freud wanted this rule to be applied can be discerned from his comparing the specificity of infantile abuse with that of the tubercle bacillus in patients suffering from tuberculosis (Freud, 1896c, p. 209; cf. Paul, 1985). The rule of specificity was not incompatible with instances of infantile abuse that were not followed by adult psychopathology, just as infection by the tubercle bacillus could occur without later clinical pathology. “The area of occurrence of an aetiological factor,” Freud wrote (1896c), “may be freely allowed to be wider than that of its effect, but it must not be narrower” (p. 209). The rule of limitation predicated that infantile sexuality was not universal but limited to abused children, for otherwise the “demonstration of its presence in every case [of adult neurosis] would carry no weight” (Freud, 1896c, p. 210).