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tive murderer, and the general villain of the piece, the universal
paternal seducer. This view of the dead old man was unacceptable to
Freud's consciousness, since he had from his infancy identified him–
self with his father; as a result of his discovery of his father's "fault,"
a fault of which we today "know nothing but its mask; the disap–
pearance of a woman and the changing of a birth date," Freud
resorted to extraordinary measures. He invented the Oedipus com–
plex largely as a repressive-defensive response to the truth of these
discoveries and shifted the guilt onto the imaginary head of the son
(himself), who became now in childhood the retroactive source of the
impulses toward incest, seduction, and murder that in the original
reality were the actual handiwork of the father. Hence the original
seduction theory was the truth, and the theory of the Oedipus com–
plex, infantile sexuality, and everything else that flows from such
conceptions are surely cover-ups for the anterior discovery of the
same unsavory truth about Freud's father. Hence, too,
all
subse–
quent intrapsychic theory falls under the same indictment of being a
repressive defense against the truth-that truth being the infliction
of sexual and psychic terror and damage by the old upon the young,
and the secret conspiracies and connivances by which that damage is
both transmitted and permitted to remain hidden.
What are we to make of this extraordinary set of charges (which
I have presented here in extremely condensed form)? To begin with,
half the evidence is wrong. Examination of the records of the birth
and circumcision of Freud in Freiberg make it clear beyond doubt
that he was born in May, and not March, of 1856. (Balmary did not
take the trouble to examine these records herself, printed copies of
which are readily available.") But that is hardly the point. The ten–
dency of this entire way of thinking is to push psychoanalytic
enquiry back toward the point where the mysteries are ultimately
external acts and external facts, mediated implicitly, of course, by
"language," which needs neither internal nor external worlds but
exists autonomously, arbitrarily, and in a context that is
sui generis.
To be sure there remains much to be explained about the mysterious
Rebecca-universal silence implying the contrary notwithstanding.
But that is not the immediate point either, which is that we are wit–
ness here to one of those swings of the historical pendulum that regu–
larly mark or suggest large-scale changes in cultural attitudes.
What is much more to the point, of course, is that in repudiat–
ing the seduction theory, Freud did not repudiate it entirely or aban-
