#seduction theory

[fragranticareviewers]

[the-final-sentence]

'We're rooting for you.'

Emily Adrian, from Seduction Theory

[vavuska]

This girl is right: Freud's mom was a hottie!

Sigmund Freud (aged 16) and his mother, Amalia, in 1872

More about Oedipus complex:

Oedipus Mythology

Bob's Burgers, Season 11, Episode 7, Diarrhea of a Poopy Kid When Gene can't eat Thanksgiving dinner because of a stomach flu, the family tr

Who were Freud's parents?

Freud was born to Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic), the first of eight children. Both of his parents were from Galicia, a historic province straddling modern-day West Ukraine and southeast Poland. His father, Jakob Freud (1815–1896), a wool merchant, had two sons, Emanuel (1833–1914) and Philipp (1836–1911), by his first marriage. Jakob's family were Hasidic Jews and, although Jakob himself had moved away from the tradition, he came to be known for his Torah study. He and Freud's mother, Amalia Nathansohn, who was 20 years younger and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer on 29 July 1855. They were struggling financially and living in a rented room, in a locksmith's house at Schlossergasse 117 when their son Sigmund was born. He was born with a caul, which his mother saw as a positive omen for the boy's future.

In 1859, the Freud family left Freiberg.

Jakob Freud took his wife and two children (Freud's sister, Anna, was born in 1858; a brother, Julius born in 1857, had died in infancy) firstly to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna where four sisters and a brother were born: Rosa (b. 1860), Marie (b. 1861), Adolfine (b. 1862), Paula (b. 1864), Alexander (b. 1866).

How was Freud's relationship with his parents?

The answer to this question could be found in the letters from Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin nose and throat doctor with whom Freud carried on a passionate 15-year friendship. The letters suggested a greater anguish by Freud over the abandonment of the seduction theory and several details about his auto-analysis.

Mothers and Nannies

Amalia was considered by her grandchildren to be an intelligent, strong-willed, quick-tempered but egotistical personality. She has been described as lively and humorous, with a strong attachment to her eldest son whom she called "mein goldener Sigi".

Just as Amalia idolised her eldest son, so there is evidence that the latter in turn idealised his mother, whose domineering hold over his life he never fully analysed.

However, nannies or nurses were always present in the Viennese's bourgeois households. The Freud-Fliess letters attracted attention to Freud's nanny and also to the role played by nannies in the ideal family of psychoanalytic theory. Included in the models that explained the bourgeois family since the nineteenth century, but excluded by analytic theory, the nanny, ever present in Austrian upper-class families, still poses a question to the father-mother-infant triangle. The relevance of the nanny's presence in children's development is fundamental and could introduce themes such as adultery, sexual harassment by the master, illegitimate children.

Freud's interest in nannies began, it seems, with the analysis of the cases that would be known in the analytical literature as those that were in the origin of the 'seduction theory' – and also with his auto-analysis. His interest, though, extended well beyond the time of this emergence, as we will see.

Almost all of his patients had a nanny or nurse – some of them had two, what would lead to a curious unfolding of this character, either in the duo good mother/ bad nanny, or, in a kind of duplication, as good nanny/bad nanny.

Freud's nanny, from whom even the name is disputed, could have been a Czech woman, a catholic, who took him to masses and reproved him for being good for nothing. He wrote:

"Today's dream has, under the strongest disguise, produced the following: she was my teacher in sexual matters and complained because I was clumsy and unable to do anything."

In the next letter (October, 15), Freud registers what his mother had told him about the nanny. Asking her if she remembered the nanny, he got the answer:

"Of course", she said, "an elderly person, very clever, she was always carrying you off to some church; when you returned home you preached and told us all about God Almighty. During my confinement with Anna (two and a half years younger) it was discovered that she was a thief, and all the shiny new kreuzers and zehners [coins] and all the toys that had been given to you were found in her possession. Your brother Philipp himself fetched the policeman; she then was given ten months in prison."

Telling that his nanny made him steal money to give her, Freud interpreted his dream as a reproach for asking money from his patients for his bad treatment of them, in the same way as "the old woman got money from me for her bad treatment." The fact that Freud used his mother's remembrance to strengthen the interpretation he made of the dream –in which he was the thief - doesn't matter here, neither his identification with the nanny, observed by some analysts of this famous dream ("I = She"), but it is relevant to consider that it seems that it was with his auto-analysis that the nanny figure began to be seen as a malignant one or, in the best hypothesis, as an ambiguous one.

What needs explanation is how the theory of the Oedipus complex accounts for the boy's guilty impulses toward his mother but ignores the boy's arousal at the hands of his nurse, especially in view of how much more attention his nurse gets from Freud than his mother does.

Discussing the possible interpretations of Freud's dreams along his auto-analysis, many authors saw the relevance of the nanny's presence in his development until his conclusion that "the remarkable circumstance" is that Freud, in effect, had two mothers, his actual mother – whose nakedness he can only mention in Latin – and his nanny whom he remembers in association with numerous disturbing sexual experiences. Having two such mothers, and the luck of having the 'bad' ugly mother banished from his life when he was only two and a half, allows Freud to maintain a secure split between the internalized good and bad mothers.

Unconsciously, Freud's nurse was his seductress and shamer, his mother the pure object of guilty desire.

Thus Freud's discovery of the Oedipus complex emerges not only from memories of a small boy's guilty, aggressive lust for his mother, but from memories of dependence on her, too – a dependence remembered, however as the seduction of a small bourgeois, Austrian boy by a Czech working-class woman in a province of the Austrian Empire still recovering from the Revolution of 1848.

Freud's father

To begin with the so-called 'seduction theory': in 1896 Freud published a polemic article in which he attributed the origin of hysteria to a sexual trauma suffered by his female – and some male - patients that ranged from sexual harassment to sexual abuse in the hands of a member of the family: uncles (some of whom were revealed as fathers in subsequent publications), brothers, guardians, school colleagues, or nannies. He said that this trauma was "unhappily" caused "too frequently, by a near kin."

In this article he said that in 18 cases of hysteria until then analyzed by him (six men and twelve women), all of them showed this etiology, or cause, of the condition.

By 1897, Freud was spending six days a week analyzing his patients, many of them suffering from hysteria. Increasingly, their problems resonated with his own. Freud began to suspect that he too was neurotic, suffering from what he described as "a little case hysteria." He became consumed by his own self-analysis.

In the spring of 1897, Freud wrote his friend Fliess about a new patient, a young woman with hysterical symptoms: "It turned out that her supposedly otherwise noble and respectable father regularly took her to bed when she was eight to twelve years old and misused her…"

It was Freud wrote, "fresh confirmation" that the prime cause of hysteria was the sexual abuse of an innocent child by an adult, most often, a father. But his theory had alarming implications. If he himself suffered from a form of hysteria, and if an abusive father caused hysteria, then Freud was forced to draw a distressing conclusion. He began to imagine that his own father might have abused him. Three months after Jacob's death, he wrote Fliess: "Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts, and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother… and those of several younger sisters."

Freud realized that he can not get further in understanding others unless he analyzes himself. That was another one of those great ideas. [But] The dreams that he analyzed are not really particularly well analyzed.

Freud interpreted the message "close the eyes" in his dream after his father's death to mean that there was something he was not meant to see, nor to know about, his father. To make his theory work, his father's secret had to be that he had sexually abused his children. But, when he could find no evidence of such behavior and no clear memory of abuse among his brothers and sisters, his seduction theory collapsed.

By the next year, he began doubting his proposition, and wrote to Fliess: "I don't believe in my neurotica [neurosis theory] any more." Even if he mentioned the seduction theory in other letters of this year (and also years after), he began, then, to treat these denounces of his patients as a fantasy.

[sassyalone]

In Simone and Ethan's generation it was still possible to throw a subversive wedding. To defy convention while willingly indoctrinating yourself into a conservative cult. Women my age don't say yes to the dress. We say 'Fuck you' to the Supreme Court and eventually, if we're lucky, 'Okay, fine,' to jointly filed taxes. Do I hope to get married someday? I do. I digress.

Seduction Theory, Emily Adrian

[poem-today]

A poem by Savannah Brown 

Seduction theory

Once I made out with a pair of twins in one night so let it be known when I want something I want more of it than usually exists. Everyone at the party follows me into the other room like a group of anthropologists trying to solve an ancient mystery. My back became a swollen star map to nowhere after fucking in the woods. Every drug makes me want my hair stroked and you would not believe all the places you can be emotionally volatile in. My boyfriends have been congratulated. I've worn still lakes as thigh highs. Someday I will conduct an uncomplicated orgy where everyone knows exactly what to do with their hands. I've filled journals with fantasies about people who hate me, imprisoned people in my mind, and they're still there. Feeling something that is almost pain. Their aliveness is dazzling with what is almost purpose.

Savannah Brown 

More poems by Savannah Brown  are available through her website.

[beneaththemooon]

[wahbegan]

I know...okay, so the initial shit we all learn about Freud is y’know “he’s the one that was convinced kids wanted to fuck their parents.”

Then i know a lot of us later, including me, learn about his creation and subsequent abandonment of “Seduction Theory”, and his basically postulating there was a massive endemic of sexual abuse of children that was the root of most mental illness, and then over time watering it down to thinking the people were talking about childhood memories metaphorically or indulging in fantasies, presumably out of a desire to retain credibility and not kick up a fuss or accuse men of perverted shit with kids.

The truth though is a lot more boring and pedestrian. Most of the acts of child sexual abuse “reported” by Freud’s patients were “repressed memories” of sexual abuse in infancy, like before age 4, uncovered by Freud after a lot of prodding and pressure and very actively sexual interpretations of their dreams.

So your childhood interpretation of Freud was closer to the truth, if not quite for the reasons you expected. He was a weird fucking pervert obsessed with kids’ sex lives, and was actively seeking out and manufacturing proof of sexual abuse, and then later when people thought that was fucked up, he watered it down to seeking out and manufacturing proof of kids fantasizing about sexual abuse.

Remember the ‘80s Satanic Panic? When a bunch of kids came forward with allegations of “repressed memories” of horrific sexual abuse at the hands of Satanic cults? And it turned out to be a load of bullshit and the kids were being led to say what they said by fundamentalist grifter “hypnotherapists”? Yeah, same thing.

Point is, every single one of Freud’s patients wasn’t a victim of pedophilia and incest. There’s no evidence it was occurring at a greater rate than it is today, and yeah, despite what some people think, there’s no evidence the world is run by and majority full of pedophiles. I’m not saying these issues aren’t very real and very damaging and under-reported, but Freud wasn’t on to anything. He didn’t figure out some dark secret and then abandon ship because shit got too hot for him.

He was just a dirty old man dreaming dark dreams about children

[arya-snark]

Seduction represents mastery over the symbolic universe

Jean Baudrillard