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Let us, for a few moments, suspend our credulity and try to imagine the course of the historical development of psychoanalytic theory and technique had Freud stayed with the seduction hypothesis pertaining to the etiology of the neuroses. Seduction initially referred to a parent's actual sexual abuse of a child whose mental apparatus was not sufficiently mature to master the massive psychological trauma that must have ensued. The watershed in psychoanalytic history has been dated to September 27, 1897 (Masson, 1985), when Freud wrote to Fliess that both his clinical experience and his self-analysis had convinced him that a psychological trauma due to sexual seduction in childhood need not actually have occurred in reality in order to initiate the neurotic process; the patient's fantasied seduction—without the occurrence of a literal seduction—was sufficient to do so. Freud's drastic theoretical change has been attributed to underlying emotional conflicts in facing the implications of the seduction theory in his own life and in warding off the enmity of the medical community in Vienna.
Judith Lewis Herman's book is a good example of what psychoanalysis would have been like if Freud had stayed with the seduction hypothesis. The conclusion that the reader inescapably reaches after reading this most interesting study is that psychoanalysis as we have known it for the past 95 years not only is useless in the treatment of neurotic illness but also is counterproductive. As Herman so aptly describes her view:
Out of the ruins of the traumatic theory of hysteria, Freud created psychoanalysis. The dominant psychological theory of the next century was founded in the denial of women's reality. Sexuality remained the central focus of inquiry. But the exploitative social context in which sexual relations actually occur became utterly invisible. Psychoanalysis became a
Page 390study of the internal vicissitudes of fantasy and desire, dissociated from the reality of experience. (p. 14)
Herm