Mental health articles

The Effect of Freud’s Renunciation
The renunciation of Freud’s seduction theory and later, the forwarding of the
Oedipus complex, profoundly affected the mental health profession. Psychoanalytic
theory became the foundation for psychiatry for many years to come, with the
Oedipus complex being the core of that theory. To use psychoanalytic theory,
however, Freud’s original theory of seduction had to be renounced. As Anna Freud wrote, "Keeping the seduction theory would mean to abandon the Oedipus complex,
and with it the whole importance of phantasy life, conscious or unconscious
phantasy. In fact, I think there would have been no psychoanalysis afterwards" (as
cited in Masson, 1984, p. 113). The development of the knowledge base on child sexual abuse was thus effectively suppressed.
To accept psychoanalytic theory, however, was to negate the client’s reality
and to place the clinician in the role of expert. These experts, then, were thought to
know more than the clients themselves about their clients’ reality. Patients who disagreed with their clinicians’ interpretations that their sexual abuse was simply a
fantasy were said to be experiencing resistance (Lerman, 1988). Even when
clinicians acknowledged the sexual abuse, victims were often blamed for seducing
their fathers so that they might fulfill their incestuous fantasies (Rush, 1996).
This emphasis on intrapsychic versus extrapsychic phenomena in the etiology of the victim’s psychopathology (Westerlund, 1986) also influenced the continued
blaming of victims, effectively silencing them. As Rush (1996) states:
Any attempt on the part of the child or her family to expose the violator also exposes
her own alleged innate sexual motives and shames her more than the offender;
concealment is the only recourse. The dilemma of the sexual abuse of children has
provided a system of foolproof emotional blackmail: if the victim incriminates the abuser, she incriminates herself: (p. 275)
Finally, by blaming the victim, the social environment could then be held
blameless. Westerlund (1986) states:
When Freud relegated women's reports of sexual abuse by their fathers to fantasy, he.. .claimed a biological determinant rather than a sociocultural determinant for female
neurosis. The incestuous wish for the father was to be seen as inherent in the daughter's
nature, the result of her physical dejciency and intrinsic biological inferiority. Seduction
fantasies were inevitable, they were representations of the innate female need to compensate themselves for their lack of a penis ….Freud was seduced into and seduced
others into protecting the sexual of fender and thus betrayed the sexual victim. (pp. 307-308)

Freud advanced his original seduction theory after discovering that many of his
“hysterical” female clients were reporting histories of incestuous abuse. He was then
confronted with the knowledge that many fathers, possibly even his own, sexually
abused their daughters. Given the opportunity to publicly identify this behavior in some fathers, he reneged, choosing instead to define "normal" behavior as girls
having precocious sexual wishes that had to be fulfilled through vivid fantasy lives.
He thus effectively colluded with a society that wished to deny the existence of child
sexual abuse, while modeling a pattern of removing blame from the offender and placing it on the victim.
"With Freud's retraction of the seduction theory, he left behind at once the
simple explanation for the trauma, his endorsement of the intrinsic strengths of the
post-traumatic patient, and his intrepid strategies for undoing the traumatic effects“
(Summit, 1989, p. 423). Possibly in no other clinical population has one person had
such a significant and detrimental effect on the outcome of so many. With his reversal
ofthe seduction theory, he colluded with a society not willing to know the truth.

Tags: renunciation