The recent publicized attention to Freud's abandonment of the seduction trauma theory to account for neurosogenesis has led to considerable re-examination of numerous interrelated psychoanalytic issues. Freud's complemental series principle serves to reconcile the apparent polarities: memory and fantasy, early experience and libidinal fixations, historical truth and psychic reality, and interpersonal and intrapsychic representations. I aim to show that although the importance of seduction and other trauma has never been rejected by psychoanalysis, the significance of such early experience has undergone historically important vicissitudes in our consideration of its place in our evolving and expanding theoretical and clinical contexts.