Neurotica: Freud and the Seduction Theory

Abstract

1. Etymologically, the infant is an animal without language: infans, it does not speak. Or, if it speaks, it babbles, making up stories, speaking illogically and irrationally. How then could a child be taken as a qualified witness? How could we believe, for example, if he told us he had witnessed a crime or had been molested? But, on the other hand, how can we prove that he is not telling the truth? Old debate, quite insoluble. The child, like the idiot or the hypnotized person, is the unreliable witness par excellence; not because he always lies (if only!), but because without external corroboration, it is as impossible to prove he is telling the truth as it is to prove the contrary. And yet, as soon as he speaks, his speech must be judged. True or false? Since there is no real basis for a decision, the decision is bound to be a matter of belief and interpretation, and as such, perfectly arbitrary and unjustifiable. How many juries have thus been accused of letting criminals off the hook or, on the contrary, of condemning innocents? Some in the United States are outraged by the acquittal of the teachers at the McMartin Preschool, who were accused of sexually abusing the children put in their charge. Others, in Great Britain, are indignant about the Cleveland case, in which pediatricians and social workers took 121 children away from their parents on mere suspicion of sexual abuse. We are told that this is the sort of situation that confronted Sigmund Freud in his elaboration and abandonment of the so-called seduction theory. Having begun by believing his hysterics, who told him that they had been raped or seduced during their early infancy, he finally decided, in September of 1897, that these stories arose from the realm of fantasy, that they were part of the properly fantastic speech of the child within. Here is what he himself had to say about this in 1933: