A �P.S.� to my previous message. I have now recalled where the notion that Freud was a paedophile (or, rather, had paedophillic tendencies) comes from. In a letter dated 31 May 1897 Freud reported to Wilhelm Fliess a dream in which he had �overaffectionate feelings� for a young girl who he identified as his four-year-old American niece whose picture he had been sent. This was the manifest dream, and Freud interpreted the latent dream as his having such feelings towards his ten-year-old daughter Mathilde. So (i) the feelings were only in a dream (ii) Freud does not state explicitly that they were overtly sexual feelings (iii) that it was his daughter who was the object of his feelings was nothing more than Freud�s interpretation of the dream. For anyone to assert that Freud had paedophillic tendencies on the basis of such evidence can only be described as malicious.
How it came about that Freud interpreted the dream to involve his daughter was that he was absorbed in concerns about his infantile seduction theory, first announced (and claimed to have been one hundred percent corroborated) in three papers published in the first half of the previous year. The motive behind the dream, Freud decided, was to bring to rest his doubts about the theory (which proposed that a precondition for hysteria was an unconscious memory of sexual excitation in infancy, with a corresponding theory for obsessional neurosis). In December 1896 he had suggested to Fliess a modified version of his theory that required that the abuser should be the father, and in the letter of 31 May 1897 he wrote that the dream shows �the fulfillment of my wish to catch a father as the originator of neurosis�. This, incidentally, is one of several facts that undercut the notion that in his published papers at that time Freud concealed that the supposed culprits involved in the (analytically reconstructed) infantile �sexual scenes� were predominantly fathers. If that had been the case for the eighteen patients on which he had reported in April 1896, he would not have been wishing in May 1897 that he could implicate a father. Other reasons to reject the widely held perception that Freud concealed that his (dubious) seduction theory claims in 1896 actually implicated fathers rather than the detailed list of categories he cited can be found in my article �Jeffrey Masson and Freud�s Seduction Theory: A New Fable Based on Old Myths�, History of the Human Sciences, 1998, vol. 11 (1), pp.1-21. (See also website address below.) For those interested in this subject, the related notion that (supposedly) Freud covered up that his clinical findings indicated widespread sexual abuse by fathers because of the (supposed) outrage which greeted his seduction theory claims is decisively refuted in my article �The Myth of Freud�s Ostracism by the Medical Community in 1896-1905: Jeffrey Masson�s Assault on Truth�, History of Psychology, 2002, vol. 5 (2), pp. 115-134. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Dept Southwark College, London 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]
