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Many people have wondered what it was that caused Freud to abandon his initial stance, according to which at the very base of neurosis there is trauma — trauma whose origins are not in a natural disaster of some kind, but in an offense from some person who, possibly not by choice, has an exceptional power in relation to the subject. To begin with, Freud believed that this offense was sexual and that the offender was one of the child's parents. Much water has passed under the bridge of child abuse since then. As opposed to Freud's stated reason for withdrawing his early theory, namely, that sexual exploitation in the family cannot reasonably be as widespread as are the neuroses — it was revealed that the phenomenon was more common than bourgeois hypocrisy was ready to admit in the first half of the twentieth century. It is quite possible that abuse was statistically not less widespread than the severe neuroses, even if there is no causal relation between them. Most probably, not all abuses led to neurosis and vice versa, not all neuroses were caused by sexual abuse. Many severely neurotic people have never experienced sexual abuse and vice versa. A question that must be raised, however, is why Freud formulated the hypothesis in the first place? To assume that he formed this idea on the basis of his experience with female hysterical patients does not seem logical to me.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137301093_6

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