The mythologizing of psychoanalytic history: deception and self-deception in Freud's accounts of the seduction theory episode

Abstract

Following in the footsteps of the pioneering articles by Frank Cioffi in the early 1970s, several scholars in recent years have scrutinized Freud's writings pertaining to the seduction theory and to his clinical procedures in the mid- 1890s and concluded that he had no adequate grounds for his contention that he had uncovered 'sexual scenes' from infancy. They have also shown that even a cursory examination of Freud's original papers reveals that they are not consistent with his later accounts of the episode. This article goes beyond indicating the manifest discrepancies between the later reports and the original papers, and analyses the retrospective accounts in considerable detail, with the aim of illuminating the means by which Freud succeeded in obscuring what actually happened with his patients in the period in question, and the reasons for his doing so.