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The aim of this slim book is summarized in the title and subtitle: the author, who is a teacher of rhetoric, takes as the nodal point in Freud's early career his abandonment of the seduction theory and adoption of the Oedipus complex, and seeks to explore and explain this puzzling, radical shift.
Factors considered are Freud's own molestation as an infant by his nursemaid, the unwelcome reception by the Vienna medical establishment of his paper on the etiology of hysteria in 1896, the prevalence of infantile sexual molestation at that time, and Freud's skewed, incomplete reading of the Oedipus myth. As suggested by the word reclaiming in the subtitle, the book laments the abandonment of the seduction hypothesis, and the default background position is Judith Herman's work from a feminist perspective on the diagnosis and treatment of sexual and domestic abuse.1
Some chronology: from October 1885 through February 1886, Freud was in Paris studying with Charcot and the French forensic medical establishment. In the etiology paper presented in Vienna on April 21, 1896, Freud, drawing on eighteen cases, took the position that all cases of hysteria were caused by infantile sexual molestation. (His insistence on sexual seduction as the only cause of later hysteria, and the elimination of all other causal factors, distinguished his 1896 position from his earlier work with Breuer.2) Marcel is harshly critical of his presentation and conclusions: “On the basis of eighteen cases, he will assert ‘universal validity’ …. He offered his conclusion in advance of giving any evidence, any case studies” (p. 69). Marcel invokes the term rhetorical fallacy: that is, without the presentation of any evidence to contradict him, Freud is automatically right.
Through his self-analysis after the Vienna rejection, Freud wrote to Fliess of what was “slowly dawning on me” as he contemplated the