A correction:
Sorry, I made a slip in my last message (no excuses, but it *is* difficult
keeping track of Freud�s contradictory assertions). I wrote:

�Odder still, although in 1925 he was still asserting that �in both cases
[boys and girls] the mother is the original [libidinal] object� (1925, SE
19, p. 251), in �New Introductory Lectures�, written a few years later, he
told his readers: �We knew, *of course*, that there had been a preliminary
stage of attachment of [infant girls] to the mother�� (1933, SE 22, p.
199, my emphasis).�

In place of the first quotation here I should have selected another
statement, from 1926, in which he wrote the opposite: �The first object of
a boy�s love is his mother, and of a girl her father� (1926, SE 20, p.
212). So the (amended) paragraph should read:

Incidentally, Freud�s analytic researches also led him to �discover� that
the first �libidinal attachment� of an infant girl is to her father. He
retained this view until 1925-1926, and then for some strange reason he
made an abrupt turn-around and declared that the first libidinal
attachment of infant girls is to the mother. Odder still, although in 1926
he was still asserting �The first object of a boy�s love is his mother,
and of a girl her father� (1926, SE 20, p. 212), in �New Introductory
Lectures�, written a few years later, he told his readers: �We knew, *of
course*, that there had been a preliminary stage of attachment of [infant
girls] to the mother�� (1933, SE 22, p. 199, my emphasis). Freud made the
change in the period 1925-1926, and wrote opposite statements on this
issue in those years. Nowhere in his later writings on female sexuality
did he explain how he could have been so mistaken for the first thirty
years of his psychoanalytic career. (For a discussion of Freud�s ideas on
female infantile sexuality, see my *Seductive Mirage*, pp. 140-149.)

Allen Esterson

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