Freud's Alleged Repudiation of the Seduction Theory Revisited: Facts and Fallacies

Over the decades the official story, nay, the shibboleth of orthodox psychoanalysis (as represented, for example, by Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, James Strachey, and Kurt Eissler), has been that Freud retracted the false seduction theory of the neuroses in favor of the true theory, infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. This change of causal theory, analysts believed, stemmed from clinical experience and was an act of intellectual courage. Freud's own account of his revelation (Freud, 1896a), recantation (letter to Fliess of September 1897), and rehabilitation of the seduction theory stands in stark contrast to the official story.

In 1981 Jeffrey Masson transformed the controversy into a cause célèbre by claiming, upon reading letters from Freud to Fliess (Freud, 1887-1904), previously expurgated by Anna Freud from their first publication in 1950, that Freud abjured the seduction theory out of cowardice and dishonesty. These views were sensationalized by reporters Ralph Blumenthal in 1981 and Janet Malcolm in 1983 (Malcolm, 1984), in The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, respectively, to climax in 1984 in the no less sensational best-seller by Masson (1984a) The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. But even before the book appeared, Malcolm's portrait of Masson in The New Yorker made him look like a mix of modern-day Rasputin with women and a seductive manipulator of his elders—in the words of psychiatrist Robert Coles writing in The Boston Globe, “a grandiose egotist—mean-spirited, self-serving, full of braggadocio, impossibly arrogant and, in the end, a self-destructive fool… his own words reveal this psychological profile” (quoted in