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Sigmund Freud
and the
Cover-Up of
"The Aetiology
of Hysteria"
Jonathan Eisen
In 1896, the young psychiatrist Sigmund Freud presented the first major
paper he had ever written to his colleagues at Vienna's Society for Psychiatry
and Neurology. Freud considered that his paper, entitled "The Aetiology
of Hysteria," was of the utmost importance, since it proposed what he
believed to be an irrefutable cause for the neuroses suffered by many of
his patients. Quite simply, when listening sympathetically to his women
patients, Freud had heard that as children they had suffered sexual
assaults, and he believed that it was these acts of violence which had led
to the victims' mental illness later in life.
The point of the paper was that sexually abused children, many of
whom had come from "respectable" middle class homes, displayed significant
"hysterias" later on in life—an observation that today would pass
as obvious to the point of banality, but something that in 1896 provoked a
backlash among Freud's older colleagues.
All the strange conditions under which the incongruous pair continue
their love relations—on the one hand the adult, who cannot escape his
share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed by a sexual relationship,
and who is at the same time armed with complete authority and
the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the
uninhibited satisfaction of his whims, and on the other hand the child,
who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary use of power,
who is prematurely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to
every sort of disappointment, and whose exercise of the sexual performances
assigned to him is often interrupted by his imperfect control
of his natural needs—all these grotesque and yet tragic disparities distinctly
mark the later development of the individual and of his neurosis,
with countless permanent effects which deserve to be traced in the
greatest detail.