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It's not true that life is one damn thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over.
The distinction between childhood memories and childhood fantasies, between external reality and psychic reality, preoccupied Freud throughout his lifework, as Strachey reminds us in an editorial note to the Rat Man paper (in Freud, 1909, p. 208). Despite Freud's so-called abandonment of the seduction theory in 1897, we can read him up through 1940 and find statements such as, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (): “the sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny frequency among school teachers and child attendants, simply because they have the best opportunity for it” (p. 148); in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (): “Fantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not fantasies but real memories” (p. 370); and in the Outline of Psychoanalysis () Freud clearly considered seduction to be “a common experience” though by no means a universal one (p. 187). One could add to these examples. As Blum (1987) has pointed out:
Psychoanalysis began with the study of actual child abuse. Freud never abandoned the concept of the reality of traumatic experience. When he gave up the seduction theory, he did not negate the importance of seduction and other forms of trauma, (p. 616)1
Still, I think there is little question that when Freud realized that many of the accounts of his patients' childhood seductions were not actual experiences but wishful fantasies, and when his self-analysis led him to the momentous discoveries of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex, the role of external reality became secondary to psychic reality. As Rapaport (1958) stated: “Reality experience lost its central position in the theory, and only slowly regained it in