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Even though the term ‘history’ [Geschichte] rarely appears in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud 1905d), a particular conception of history — which Freud evoked here and there through what he called ‘culture history’ or by referring to ‘culture historians’ — pervades the book. Who were these ‘culture historians’? How and why did their perspective inform the heart of the Freudian theory of neuroses? Such issues are of definite interest for analysts, even more so since in 1905 Freud evoked ‘culture history’ as an alternative to the situation of psychoanalysis. Moreover ‘culture historians’ were recognized for their ability to reveal causes that talk within the medical practice could not bring out. This was a crossroad in the evolution of Freudian theory, which opened — in a quite incredible manner — an after-life for the analytic situation, which was meant to sustain the hypothesis of a sexual origin of neuroses and perversions.
After re-enacting, step-by-step, Freud's sustaining his theory thanks to mysterious ‘culture historians’, I will examine the role and consequences of the introduction of culture history into the Freudian theory of neuroses.
In the Three Essays, Freud primarily cared to articulate the issues that were examined in the autobiographical stories of the ‘inverts’. Indeed, ‘Many writers [and Moll in particular] have insisted with justice that the dates (die autobiographischen Angaben) assigned by inverts themselves for the appearance of their tendency to inversion are untrustworthy … a decision on this point could be arrived only by a psycho-analytic investigation of inverts’ (Freud 1905d, p. 137, fn. 2; the words within the squared brackets were part of the 1905 edition, GW 5, p. 35, n. 2). Yet, even if — unlike a more