This paper, along with “On the Aetiology of Hysteria,” marks the high point of Freud's belief in the reality of the seduction hypothesis.
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“L'hérédité et l'étiologie des névroses,” published March 30.
In other words the ultimate cause was always the seduction of a child by an adult. (Cf.
Although it is found so very often side by side with hysteria, this is due to the circumstance that masturbation itself is a much more frequent consequence of abuse or seduction than is supposed.
It is not at all rare for both of the two children to fall ill later on of a defence neurosis—the brother with obsessions and the sister with hysteria.
As a result, I attributed to the aetiological factor of seduction a significance and universality which it does not possess.
Nevertheless, we need not reject everything written in the text above. Seduction retains a certain aetiological importance, and even to-day I think some of these psychological comments are to the point.
First of all, in earliest childhood, we have the experiences of sexual seduction that will later on make repression possible; and then come the acts of sexual aggression against the other sex, which will later appear in the form of acts involving self-reproach.
It was represented either by a brutal assault committed by an adult or by a seduction less rapid and less repulsive, but reaching the same conclusion. In seven out of the thirteen cases the intercourse was between children on both sides—sexual relations between a little girl and a boy a little older (most often her brother) who had himself been the victim of an earlier seduction. These relations sometimes continued for years, until the little guilty parties reached puberty; the boy would repeat the same practices with the little girl over and over again and without alteratio—practices to which he himself had been subjected by some female servant or governess and which on account of their origin were often of a disgusting sort.
1
The very fact of sexual aggressions of this kind taking place at such a tender age seems to reveal the influence of a previous seduction of which the precocity of sexual desire would be the consequence.
They will further maintain that it is easy, by making a few enquiries, to find people who remember scenes of sexual seduction and sexual abuse in their childhood years, and yet who have never been hysterical.
Where the relation is between two children, the character of the sexual scenes is none the less of the same repulsive sort, since every such relationship between children postulates a previous seduction of one of them by an adult.
It seems to me more and more that the essential point of hysteria is that it results from perversion on the part of the seducer, and more and more that heredity is seduction by the father. Thus an alternation emerges between generations:
1st generation — perversion
2nd generation — hysteria, and consequent sterility.
The pins which appear in the most astonishing ways, the needles on account of which the poor things have their breasts cut open but which are invisible by X-rays though they can be found in the story of their seduction …
Once more the inquisitors prick with needles, to discover the Devil's stigmata, and in a similar situation the victims invent the same old cruel story (helped perhaps by the seducer's disguises).
The pins which make their appearance in the oddest ways; the sewing needles on account of which the poor things let their breasts be mutilated and which are not visible by X-ray, though they can no doubt be found in their seduction stories! Eckstein has a scene [that is, remembers] where
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the diabolus sticks needles into her fingers and then places a candy on each drop of blood.
Notes
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Hysterie-Urgeschichte, no doubt a reference to the time of life (in childhood) when seduction occurred.
The German reads: “Nun stechen die Inquisitoren wieder mit Nadeln um die Stigmata Diaboli zu finden, und in der ähnlichen Situation fällt den Opfern in Dichtung (vielleicht durch Verkleidungen der Verführer unterstützt) die alte grausame Geschichte ein.
So if Freud had only said fällt den Opfern die alte grausame Geschichte ein, he would certainly have meant that an actual event, a seduction, occurs to the patients. By adding in Dichtung, he raises the question of whether the stories occurring to the patient were true or invented.
If they are carrying out an act of vengeance for a seduction in their own past, their severity is merely a distorted form of memory, what Freud was later to call a piece of action.
Freud means, I believe, the scenes of real seduction — the earliest scenes. “Primal scene,” in the later sense of intercourse between parents, is first used in the wolf-man discussion (S.E.
Thus I was able to trace back, with certainty, a hysteria that developed in the context of a periodic mild depression to a seduction, which occurred for the first time at 11 months and [I could] hear again the words that were exchanged between two adults at that time!
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Same phrase used in letter of April 28, 1897, clearly in the sense (both here and there) of the father as the source of neurosis; in other words, the seduction theory.
For the significance of this important passage, see Masson (1984, p.
As the text was printed, one might have assumed that Freud was speaking of the seduction hypothesis as the serious error, and his hope that he would be led to new discoveries by abandoning it.
But with the addition of the omitted word, zurück, it becomes more likely that Freud is referring to the seduction theory as correct, and he hopes this year (not next year) to come back to this theory.
Further on, however, Janet (2:186-188) describes the seduction of a seven-year-old girl and explains the suicide attempts and hysterical attacks in a fourteen-year-old as due to attempted rape.
1 The scene would then be putting back into early
childhood a seduction to masturbation—someone was helping him to do it—which
in fact occurred at a later period. But even so, it does not fit, for in the childhood
scene there were a number of other people present.’
Whereas his seduction to masturbate must have occurred in solitude and
secrecy.