You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Why, you may wonder, should the seduction theory—abandoned by Freud back in the nineteenth century—be dragged into the twenty-first? The first hundred pages or so of The Seduction Theory in Its Second Century: Trauma, Fantasy, and Reality Today, which constitute Part I, are devoted to this very question. The issue is further elaborated in the concluding papers presented in Part rV. Part II is about “Analysts at Work with Patients Whose Lives Are Characterized by the Traumas of Everyday Life,” and Part HI deals with “Analysts at Work with Severely Traumatized Patients.”
This book is a compendium of presentations and discussions at the 1998 New York symposium of the same name, chaired by Arnold Rothstein, along with an introduction and a postscript by editor Michael I. Good. The symposium brought together analysts from Freudian, relational, interpersonal, and self psychological perspectives. The fact that the list of presenters, discussants, and moderators reads like a “Who's Who in American Psychoanalysis” is the first indication of the high quality of the material.
So why are we still talking today about the seduction hypothesis? The general answer is because it bears on the core of psychoanalysis: its history, development, and major theoretical and clinical questions. Good traces the roots of the seduction theory, while George Makari, in a piece of erudite historical research, places Freud and his ideas in the context of nineteenth-century medicine. He outlines Freud's struggle with the notion of specific causes (of hysteria) and trauma theory. He delineates the shift in Freud's thinking that gradually gave rise to the importance of fantasy and the primacy