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of a general category of causes. Eight years later, he denied that he had
exaggerated the frequency or importance of sexual seduction and had not
recognized that some victims of sexual abuse remained normal. It took him
six more years to give up the trauma theory. By then the movement was
successful, Freud had converted his repudiation of the seduction theory,
had more or less replaced it by sexual libido, and was busy defending his
movement against Adler and Jung. This "revolutionary paradigm shift,"
inevitably, was bound up with the history of psychoanalysis, and involved
truth claims related to personal and communal identities-details revision–
ists such as Masson and Sulloway have left out.
The second speaker, Jay Greenberg, a member of the William Alanson
White group, recalled that Freud's success with hysterical patients had
clued him in on the link between repressed experiences and physical symp–
toms; and that the premature sexual exposure these patients shared had led
him
to postulate seduction as the
sine qua non
of psychoneuroses. Under
the circumstances, asked Greenberg, how could Freud have abandoned this
hypothesis without giving up on psychoanalysis? He reminded us also that
Freud used other concepts, such as "libido," "castration," or "traunla" just
as metaphorically, literally, playfully, and ambiguously:
Veifiihrung
implies
that it is with someone the child knows; may be perpetrated by a stranger,
a governess, a relative or another child; and was central in creating the dis–
position to hysteria. Freud changed his mind because he realized that
seduction is differentiated: it mayor may not be abusive; can be due to gen–
ital irritation; or to a caring, seductive mother. Greenberg ended up
defining seduction,
a
la
Laplanche, as the intervention of the adult other,
with his sexual unconscious that contains the potential for living a fully
realized sexual-and relational-life, as well as the greatest danger of
falling ill.
Henry Smith, of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England East,
thought Makari was extrapolating backwards and reading Freud's shift too
literally, and that Greenberg, in a metaphorical way, was adopting the
"poise of an elephant sitting on a fence," in order to select what best fits
into his relational framework. Implicitly relying on Sulloway's interpreta–
tions, Smith maintained that Freud's reconstructive lens may lead to truth
not contained in the li teral period of the times; that unconscious tricks may
distort memory in retrospect; and that Freud always held on to ambiguity,
which is contrary to our current habi t to dichotomize. Makari responded
that he prefers to complicate history by going to the sources, and
Greenberg-politely--said that he was addressing the topic of the session
rather than throwing words at concepts.
Helen Meyers (Columbia University Center) pointed out that seduc–
tion calls attention to the fact that something is wrong. Greenberg, she
