Talk:Freud's seduction theory

message: There are some facts lacking referring to the history of the paper's presentation. Where to insert them best?
:Austerlitz -- 88.75.72.39 (talk) 21:10, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Facts 

message: I have added several books and articles which discuss the seduction theory from the perspective of an examination of the original documents rather than Freud's retrospective accounts of the episode.
Esterson (talk) 11:57, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Further Reading 

message: I have left the current paragraph untouched, but added a paragraph presenting a different, fully-referenced, view, based on the examination of the original documents by several Freud scholars.
Esterson (talk) 14:53, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Freud’s reported evidence for the seduction theory 

message: I have partially rewritten the first paragraph giving Freud's reasons for abandoning the seduction theory so that his own explanation is given, rather than reasons partially mediated by a secondary source. The secondary references have been replaced by a single primary reference.
Esterson (talk) 09:32, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: As with several other articles you have edited recently, this is an extremely one-sided and obviously far from neutral account of things. It will need rewriting in order to bring it into accord with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. Skoojal (talk) 10:26, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

text: I just want to belatedly say that I now see the rationale behind Skoojal's comment above. Thanks to some editors, including Skoojal, I have now come to appreciate the basic rules of Wikipedia, and that some terms (e.g., Original Research) have a specifically Wikipedian meaning. This is why I have rewritten all my recent contributions to accord with Wikipedia regulations. Esterson (talk) 09:01, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Abandonment of the Seduction Theory 

message: "This article does not actually discuss what seduction theory is. Please help by expanding."
In response to this request I have radically amended the first two paragraphs to provide the information required. Esterson (talk) 18:27, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opening paragraphs 

message: The section on Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory states that, "Gerald N. Izenberg's essay "Seduced and abandoned: The rise and fall of Freud's seduction theory," part of The Cambridge Companion to Freud, provides a thorough and competent discussion as to the controversy surrounding Freud's abandonment of the Seduction Theory." Izenberg's discussion may be thorough and competent, but such an evaluation requires a source, otherwise it is simply a statement of opinion, and not in accord with WP:NPOV. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 23:00, 16 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Izenberg 

message: I'm not sure enough of what the last clause means to clarify this sentence. However, that's better evidence than any that it needs clarifying. I would appreciate it if someone familiar with the topic could do so. Thanks! Exercisephys (talk) 23:42, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarity 

message: The so-called "seduction theory" was never originated or held by Freud himself. Rather, it sprung from the mind of his mentor, trained rhinologist Josef Breuer, whilst young Freud, as part of his study of medicine and anatomy, worked as Breuer's assistant, which was the sole reason why Breuer's works on the seduction theory also bore Freud's name, as Breuer's assistant. Freud also never gave any public lecture on it in front of any medical society that supposedly led to a "public outcry" against him. Many authors preferring to buy into Breuer's seduction theory and hence claiming that Freud "abandoned" it due to sheer cowardice or corrupt, sinful patriarchal malice often confuse this with two contemporarily controversial lectures that Freud actually held in Vienna, the first held in the mid-1880s mainly parroting Charcot's views on hysteria (this lecture was controversial because Freud had used the word "hysteria" also for men, without ever mentioning molestation), and the second, held in the early 1900s, being on his original concept of infantile sexuality.
It is also not true that Freud's early letter to Fließ, which summarized the affair with a very brief overview to a friend already educated in medical terms and Freud's studies, would be his only written account of his opposition to Breuer's seduction theory. Freud gave a far more detailled account of the Breuer-Freud controversy which led to their split and eventually to Freud's own development of psychoanalysis in opposition to Breuer in his auto-biographical 1938 Abriß der Psychoanalyse written for the general public, where he precisely lists his three reasons in detail that led him to oppose Breuer's seduction theory:
*a.) Freud increasingly found tangible evidence in individual cases even logically outruling any potential possibility the supposedly 'recovered' events of childhood molestation could have occured (for instance, patients had never lived with their 'accused' parents),
*b.) Freud found himself able to most easily 'direct' his adult patients in the highly suggestible state of hypnosis, as was favored by Breuer as method of "uncovering" 'repressed memories', into any recollection of memory he wanted to, even moreso in an entirely boundless manner when he turned to sexual matters, and
*c.) aspects (such as objects or places) linked to the supposed childhood molestation had not been 'repressed' by his patients and were not perceived by his patients as alarming or frightening on themselves, but in fact frequently even were connoted with positive emotions, partly even very intensely so, in a manner that the patients themselves could not explain.
Freud deduced from a.) and b.) that the unconscious mind tapped into by hypnosis actually knows no distinction between memories of past events and presently induced imagination and that therefore, the unconcious mind easily becomes subject to after-the-fact manipulation of memories and imagination, and by combining this analysis with c.), he concluded that it's personal desires and fantasies that are getting repressed as demanded according to social taboo, even if, as he often maintained, these desires have very different forms and expressions in adulthood than they do during childhood.
As noted by historian of science and medicine Florian Mildenberger in his 2006 monography Beispiel Peter Schult on Germanophone medical and societal attitudes towards paedophilia, Freud did not make the Breuer-Freud controversy public at the time and didn't even discuss it within the Psychoanalytic Society, with the result being that it pretty much cropped up again around 1930 with Sandor Ferenczi's concepts of Identifikation mit dem Aggressor and Sprachverwirrung pretty much repeating Breuer's position. Freud, sr. bowed out at the time, leaving his daughter Anna Freud to respond in her father's tradition and confront Ferenczi with her concept of Identifikation mit dem Angreifer targeted directly at Ferenczi. Soon, Freud, sr. himself followed with his auto-biographical Abriß der Psychoanalyse, where he went into detail on the Breuer-Freud controversy and how it had caused Breuer and Freud to go separate ways.
Now, Anna Freud has often been critizized for overplaying individual and ego psychology while neglecting environmental, societal, and cultural aspects, but noted Materialist and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, who was also a noted Freudian, while he never directly touched upon the Breuer-Freud aka Ferenczi-Freud controversy on "repressed memories" of molestation, indirectly but strongly supported Anna Freud on the issue by ostensibly and frequently adopting her related terminology (Identifikation mit dem Angreifer) in opposition to Ferenczi's (Identifikation mit dem Aggressor), and in some of his essays (Die revidierte Psychoanalyse, Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie, and Theorie der Halbbildung, among others) detailed his reasons for this choice to adopt Anna Freud's model rather than Ferenczi's, mainly by referring to how Anna Freud's concept was more in line with Freud's social and Materialist views of the psychic apparatus being a result of social interaction and conflict, while Ferenczi's concept rather rendered him a regressed conformist rebel (a concept Adorno explained at length in his The Authoritarian Personality), without touching upon the topic of molestation directly. Only within his essay Sexualtabu und Recht heute ("Sexual taboo and the law today"), Adorno came closest to the underlying debate within the Breuer-Freud aka Ferenczi-Freud controversy (and also probably his choice of Anna Freud's vocabulary) as within that essay, while emphasizing that it be far from him to justify the legalization of sex with minors, he openly and at great length and detail compares the socio-psychological motivation to persecute prostitutes, the clients of prostitutes, and paedophiles to that of anti-Semitism, as in that all these forms of societal persecution are based upon the persecutor's repression of their own socially-shunned sexual desires that are hence projected upon minority out-groups by means of a process that he terms pathical (i. e. socially-learned) projection. Adorno's concept of pathical projection was based in equal parts upon Freud's writings as well as Karl Marx's On the Jewish question, wherein Marx posited that anti-Semitism stemmed from gentile Bourgeoisie ideologically projecting the qualities of their own Capitalist Charaktermasken social role of bourgeois individuals upon Jews as scapegoats in a personalizing or "falsely concretist" manner by which it seeks to exorcize the qualities of its own Capitalist system and the Charaktermasken it creates by projecting it upon Jews as the supposed "cause" of Capitalism that the bourgeois class itself fails to comprehend.
Later, Adorno-informed sources (particularly referring to a.) anti-Americanism as forms of anti-Democratism, anti-modernism, anti-liberalism, and of hatred towards emancipatory, scientifically Enlightened humanist reason, b.) to anti-Zionism as a combination of the same motives behind anti-Americanism combined with replacing the Jews as a people with the Jewish state in order to superficially avoid the anti-Semitism label, and c.) to simplistic personalizing conspiracy theories on "banksters" being responsible for Capitalism by their personal own greed, rather than systemic materialistic causes of Capitalist crises due to the Capitalist mode of production) would come to refer to this universal socio-psychological mechanism of pathical projection upon out-groups and outsiders that Adorno had originally described in anti-Semitism (as he'd particularly done in Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Authoritarian Personality, while first extending the concept to also apply to anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism in his essay Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit), and later in other forms of social persecution directed against prostitution and paedophilia, as "structural anti-Semitism" or "secondary anti-Semitism" because as has been posited by Adorno, other socially-shunned out-groups may take the place in the persecutor's mind that in anti-Semitism is held by Jews. --2003:71:4E07:BB09:FC3A:9551:4E36:AD36 (talk) 16:10, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Breuer vs. Freud 

message: What is the meaning 122.53.185.85 (talk) 03:16, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Seduction Theory