Freud's seduction theory

Freud's seduction theory was a hypothesis developed in the 1890s by noted psychotherapist Sigmund Freud to explain the claims of sexual abuse amongst his patients.

Freud initially thought that his patients were relating more or less factual stories of sexual mistreatment, and that the sexual abuse was responsible for many of his patient's neuroses and other mental health problems. Freud later rejected this seduction theory, concluding that the memories of sexual abuse were in fact imaginary fantasies.

Freud’s seduction theory
In 1896 Freud presented a paper on the etiology of hysteria, known today as neurosis. Using a sample of 18 patients from his practice, he concluded that all of them had been the victims of unwanted sexual assaults by various caretakers. The cause of the patient’s distress lay in a trauma inflicted by an actor in the childs’ social environment. The source of internal psychic pain lay in an act inflicted upon the child from outside. This led to his well known ‘seduction theory’.

Freud's seduction theory emphasizes the causative impact of nurture: the shaping of the mind by experience. This theory held that hysteria and obsessional neurosis are caused by repressed memories of infantile sexual abuse. Infantile sexual abuse, the root of all neurosis, is premature introduction of sexuality into the experience of the child. Trauma creates affects and thoughts that simply cannot be integrated. The adult who had a normal, non traumatic childhood is able to contain and assimilate sexual feelings into a continuous sense of self. Freud proposed that adults who experienced sexual abuse as a child suffer from unconscious memories and feelings incompatible with the central mass of thoughts and feelings that constitute his or her experience. Psychic disorders are a direct consequence of experiences that cannot be assimilated. Infantile sexual abuse was a necessary condition for the development of certain disorders, hysteria in particular. But another condition had to be met: There had to be an unconscious memory of the abuse After presenting the evidence for the seduction theory, Freud choose for several reasons to abandon his seduction theory.

Freud’s reported evidence for the seduction theory
Freud had a lot of data as evidence for the seduction theory, but rather than presenting the actual data on which he based his conclusions (his clinical cases and what he had learned from them) or the methods he used to acquire the data (his psychoanalytic technique), he instead addressed only the evidence that the data he reportedly acquired were accurate (that he had discovered genuine abuse). He thought that the community could not yet handle the clinical case stories about sexual abuse. He did not want to present this stories before the seduction theory had become more accepted Freud made several arguments to support the position that the memories he had uncovered were genuine. One of them was, according to Freud, that the patients were not simply remembering the events as they would normally forgotten material; rather they were essentially reliving the events, with all the accompanying painful sensory experiences.

Abandonment of ‘seduction theory’
Several reasons made Freud choose to abandon his own theory. First, he referred to his inability to “bring a single analysis to a real conclusion” along with his inability to explain partial successes. Second, Freud referred to the “surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding his own, had to be accused of being perverse” along with the alleged recognition that the incidence of “perversions against children” would have to be much more widespread than Freud and educated European society of the late 1800s believed probable. Third, Freud referred to indications that, he argued, the unconscious is unable to distinguish fact from fiction. In the unconscious there is no sign of reality, so one cannot differentiate between the truth and the fiction invested with feeling. Fourth, Freud wrote of his belief that in deep-reaching psychosis, unconscious memories do break through to the conscious.

The collapse of the seduction theory led in 1897 to the emergence of Freud's new theory of infantile sexuality. The impulses, fantasies and conflicts that Freud claimed to have uncovered beneath the neurotic symptoms of his patients derived not from external contamination, he now believed, but from the mind of the child itself. He shifted his emphasis from nurture to nature.

There were some serious negative consequences of this shift. The most obvious negative consequence was that the chance increased that women (and men) who have said to be sexually abused in their childhood, were not believed anymore or were even told that they had wished to be abused. Though, without the rejection of the seduction theory concepts such as the unconscious, repressions, the repetition compulsion, transference and resistance, and the unfolding psychosexual stages of childhood would never have been added to human knowledge.