as one of the foremost psychoanalysis posters on my dash i was wondering if you've heard this account of freud's early career: while treating women for hysteria he found that most of them were assaulted by male family members as children & developed psychological problems as a result (seduction theory?). but his writings on it were unpopular (especially among the wealthy men whose daughters he was treating), so he came up with the oedipus & electra complex as an alternate explanation that let his clients off the hook, instead saying that something just went wrong internally (lundy bancroft called it the beginning of victim-blaming in psychology).
as someone who knows more than i about this field, do you know if there's any accuracy to this story? it seems to imply psychosexual development theory exists to cover up traumatic events, which puts a shaky foundation under any later theories drawing from it, and people often dismiss all of freud & psychoanalysis because of it...
yes its true about the history seduction theory but im not entirely sure if it is as directly correlated to the oedipus complex as it often is thought by critics of freud, and i dont think it invalidates the principles of psychoanalysis as a whole. his correspondence with some other doctors in the 1890s are directly related to seduction theory and you can see that the issue of seduction theory concerned him a lot and he was reluctant to dismiss it but was very influenced by society at the time.
another complicating factor is that much of freuds work was preserved by his daughter anna freud, who was for the most part a conservative force in psychoanalysis both in her own practice and in how she presented his work. a lot of his letters and writings are omitted and edited because of her, including things that show his own ambivalence about certain ideas and how his relationships with other doctors and psychiatrists influenced him to take certain positions.
this article goes into it a bit and you can see the ways that anna freud has influenced our knowledge of freud and a little bit about this period of his studies. i think another thing people really miss when they talk about freud is that so much modern medicine we currently use today came from this time period as well and just as much of the "hard sciences" also came from some things that seem pretty ridiculous and unscientific to us today, and many just outright wrong, but only psychoanalysis is given so much skepticism and criticism.
this is not to defend it, freud was absolutely incorrect in many cases and, contrary to popular views of him, very aware of the limits of his knowledge and the inaccuracies inherent in pioneering any new type of medicine. this especially he emphasizes- that any new science is bound to make errors and be imprecise. freud constantly was reformulating his ideas and made many revisions to psychosexual theory throughout his life, not to mention by all the psychoanalysts who came after him. historically, its not surprising that freud and the other pioneering psychoanalysts, most of them austrian and german jews already occupying an uneasy position, were led to revise some of their more radical discoveries that appeared to threaten turn of the century european society. psychoanalysis was considered extremely shocking and obscene at the time for even venturing to say that sexuality had such a presence in peoples lives, and that people were not moved entirely by reason and rationality (as this was the era of the enlightenment and a lot of optimism about science) so sure its disappointing but not surprising that freud retracted some of his more controversial views. and likely he would not have been as successful if he did not retract them, unfortunately. similarly with some of his writings on bisexuality that seem to point to the idea that there is no natural drive towards heterosexuality and there is no natural form sexuality takes.
the oedipus complex came more from other studies and freuds own self analysis than from seduction theory (to my knowledge at least) freud actually applied the oedipus complex only to young boys initially and has some stuff (that in my opinion holds up fairly well today and is compatible with ideas of construction of sexual and gendered difference we have now) about how young girls only come to the position of seeing the father as a love object after they realize through societal and family norms they are not meant to want the mother and 'unwillingly' (this is how freud and other early psychoanalysts describe it) are forced to identify with the mother and desire the father. freud rejected the idea of a parallel electra complex for women broke with jung over this, among other things.
im very much against this idea of freud as the founder of modern misogyny or the "beginning of victim blaming in psychology." this is a myopic historiography that ignores how radical freuds approach was in comparison with psychology and medical science at the time. most physicians at the time believed that patients hysteric or neurotic symptoms were either signs of a physical organic disease or that they were consciously faking them and in control of them. (why is freud the father of victim blaming and not these doctors?) common treatment would mainly be locking them up to be studied or dubious 19th century surgeries and medical treatments. freud was one of the first to ever propose that hysteric and neurotic patients were not purposefully consciously deciding to do this but unconsciously reacting to something that happened to them, that symptoms represented a patient history that may be unknown or unarticulated to them but could be brought out by associations etc. thus that no symptoms are random or meaningless, all have some psychic significance, and it can be uncovered through analysis. this is the most crucial discovery of psychoanalysis, and although i think it was wrongly applied to seduction theory, he shows it time and again in many of his other clinical studies and interpretation of dreams, and it does not invalidate the whole of psychoanalysis
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