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The Suppression of Unorthodox Science 187
In fact, as author and former Freud Archives Director Jeffrey Masson
discussed at some length in his controversial bestseller The Assault On
Truth: Freud's Suppression Of The Seduction Theory (Farrar Straus and
Giroux, 1984), the pressure that was brought to bear on Freud was strong
enough to make him change his mind completely about the validity of the
sexual assault theory. In a dramatic about-face, he formulated his "seduction
theory," in which children themselves became the seducers rather
than the victims.
Freud's inaugural paper, "The Aetiology of Hysteria" was singled out
from all the other papers presented in Vienna in 1896 as the one paper that
was not published in the "Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift," the peer journal
for the newly forming school of psychoanalysis. Unlike all the other papers
delivered, there was no summary and no discussion of Freud's work.
According to Masson, Freud wrote a letter to his close friend Wilhelm
Fliess that "A lecture on the aetiology of hysteria at the Psychiatric
Society met with an icy reception . . . and from Krafft-Ebing the strange
comment: It sounds like a scientific fairy tale. And this after one has
demonstrated to them a solution to a more than thousand year old problem,
a 'source of the Nile.'"
According to Masson, "The prospect of being ostracized by medical
society was negligible in the face of his knowledge that he had discovered
an important truth." At this point Freud believed what his patients were
telling them, namely that they had been sexually assaulted, usually by
their fathers, but sometimes by their mothers, and were living in shame
and pain and self-loathing.
... The behaviour of patients while they are reproducing these infantile
experiences is in every respect incompatible with the assumption that
the scenes are anything less than a reality which is being felt with distress
and reproduced with the greatest reluctance.
Masson states that Freud went to some pains to assert his own objectivity
and admitted that "he too had to overcome resistances before
accepting the unpalatable truth," and was therefore somewhat prepared
for his colleagues' negative reaction to his paper.
When the reaction did come it was swift and severe, and conveyed the
impression that unless Freud recanted, his future as a psychotherapist
would be in jeopardy.
"I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given
out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me," Freud wrote to
Fleiss. And slowly began the transformation that would result in his repudiation
of the earlier theory of sexual trauma, to be replaced by the
convoluted theory of the infants' fantasy of sexually seducing the parent.