From Allen Esterson
There are numerous errors in Thomas Henretta’s letter about Freud and false memories (27 September, p 26). Freud was not using direct hypnosis at the time of the seduction theory episode in the mid-1890s. More important, as several scholars have now shown, his later accounts of the episode were grossly misleading.
At the time, he did not report that his female patients had been sexually abused by their fathers. Moreover, there were no “stories” of early childhood sexual abuse from the patients in question (one-third of whom were men). Freud analytically reconstructed preconceived childhood “sexual scenes” for every one of his current patients, largely on the basis of the symbolic interpretation of their symptoms.
Nor did he “question his patients further” and so discover that the supposed sexual abuse had been fantasised. It was some nine years later that he came up with his unconscious fantasy theory story to explain away his highly improbable claim of 100 per cent childhood sexual abuse of the patients in question, and not until 1914 that he first claimed that the women among these patients had fantasised abuse by their fathers.
London, UK
