Abstract
In his early paper, “The etiology of hysteria,” Sigmund Freud maintained that patients with hysteria had been sexually abused as young children. He soon ruefully discarded this theory but publicly repudiated it nine years later. In a recent book Jeffrey Masson claims Freud suppressed his seduction theory to prevent professional isolation. I defend Freud's honesty by recalling his unyielding courage when his later theories brought him obloquy and, secondly, by criticizing his early paper. It was written with little psychiatric experience and in it Freud neither defined hysteria nor gave any detailed case histories. He actually claimed that sexual seduction in childhood “caused” not only hysteria but “neurosis of obsessions”, “chronic paranoia” and “other functional psychoses” as welt; this seems excessive. His primitive method of psychoanalysis doubtless suggested to his patients the very “scenes” that shocked him.