Sorry, folks, about coming back to this topic just when you thought you’d heard the last of it (from me at least), but this time it’s to correct a momentary misapprehension of my own. On rereading my message just posted I realized that I had made an error. It is certainly true that around the immediate period when Freud finally gave up on the seduction theory (1897-1898) it was not because he had “discovered” that in some cases the infantile “sexual scenes” had not actually occurred. (How could he possibly have discovered that such events had *not* occurred in the very early childhoods of his patients? Only in highly unusual circumstances can a negative like this be proven. And if he had by some remarkable chance made such a discovery he would certainly have told Fliess about it.) However, he *had* written to Fliess at this time about unconscious phantasies implicitly or explicitly in relation to the seduction theory. These new explanations, incidentally, were put forward only *after* he had concluded that the theory was erroneous on more general grounds, such as rather crude epidemiological considerations and the fact that he hadn’t been able to bring a single case to a successful conclusion (letter, 21 September 1897). But, contrary to what I wrote in my previous message, he was concluding *at that time* that the analytically reconstructed “sexual scenes” for at least some of his patients treated in 1895-1897 were unconscious phantasies. This means that in the statement of Freud’s from 1906 that I quoted in my last message he was being less than candid about his current view of the 1896 claims. He *had* come to the conclusion that in many of the cases (at least) what he had supposedly ‘uncovered’ were actually phantasies. (He couldn’t know *how* many because, seeing it in his own terms, he had no possible way of deciding if his own reconstructed “scenes” were of real ‘memories’ or were unconscious phantasies.) On the other hand he was loathe to admit to his colleagues that the clinical ‘findings’ he had proclaimed so emphatically in 1896 were erroneous, so he settled on a compromise by maintaining that his 1896 clinical claims were valid while going on to write about his later explaining unspecific “phantasies of seduction” as screen memories for infantile masturbation. (He dropped the first part of the compromise when he next recounted the story in 1914. Although the difference between his original 1896 claims and the final report in 1933 is large, it changed by relatively small steps, with the aid of much obfuscation, at each stage of the journey. [See Esterson 2001)
If you find all this a bit confusing (those who have read this far!), don’t think I haven’t! It has taken a long time, and much discussion with colleagues, to try and sort out what actually happened through the twists and turns of Freud’s several inconsistent accounts, in which so much is not what it seems. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Dept Southwark College, London [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
