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During the last five years of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud developed most of the core psychodynamic and developmental insights that became psychoanalysis. Freud's articulation and subsequent partial repudiation of a specific etiology (“seduction”) theory for the neuroses represents a crucial chapter in the transformation of his positivist science into a modern hermeneutics. These changes in Freud's theoretical stance are complexly involved with his self-analysis and early clinical practice, and they form an important chapter in the intellectual history of psychodynamic psychology. The pre-psychoanalytic theory of traumatic etiology was a significant advance in epidemiological thinking and remains an important model for studying the effects of early emotional experience on personality development and adult psychopathology.
Psychoanalysis, as a related body of clinical technique, interpretive strategy, and developmental theory, took shape in a decade centered on 1900, spanning the period between the publication of Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1895) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud, 1905). Within this decade of fertile intellectual activity a four-year span, comprising the papers outlining the “Seduction Theory” (Freud, 1896a, 1896b, 1896c) and the completion of The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900), is of special interest for an assessment of the process by which psychoanalytic psychology evolved. Recent biographical work on Freud has also revealed the richness and complexity of the personal influences on his theorizing during these crucial mid-life years. One thinks, for example, of