Let me tell you straight away the great secret which has been slowly dawning on me in recent months. I no longer believe in my neurotica. That is hardly intelligible without an explanation; you yourself found what I told you credible. So I shall start at the beginning and tell you the whole story of how the reasons for rejecting it arose. The first group of factors were the continual disappointment of my attempts to bring my analyses to a real conclusion, the running away of people who for a time had seemed my most favourably inclined patients, the lack of the complete success on which I had counted, and the possibility of explaining my partial successes in other, familiar, ways. Then there was the astonishing thing that in every case . . . blame was laid on perverse acts by the father, and realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, in every case of which the same thing applied, though it was hardly credible that perverted acts against children were so general*.
Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psycho-analysis. Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887–1902, Edited by Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Ernst Kris. Authorised translation by Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey. Imago Publishing Co. Ltd., London, 1954, p.216
*Footnote : Freud’s attention had for months past been directed to the study of infantile
Footnote by James Strachey
phantasy; he had studied the dynamic function of phantasy and gained lasting insights into this field. See pp. 204 and 207 and Letter 62 sqq. He had drawn near to the Oedipus complex, in which he recognized the aggressive impulses of children directed against their parents, but had still remained faithful to his belief in the reality of the seduction scenes. It seems reasonable to assume that it was only the self-analysis of this summer that made possible rejection of the seduction hypothesis.
Il faut que je te confie tout de suite le grand secret qui, au cours de ces derniers mois, s’est lentement révélé. Je ne crois plus à ma neurotica (théorie des névroses), ce qui ne saurait être compris sans explication ; tu avais toi-même trouvé plausible ce que je t’avais dit. Je vais donc commencer par le commencement et t’exposer la façon dont se sont présentés les motifs de ne plus y croire. Il y eut d’abord les déceptions répétées que je subis lors de mes tentatives pour pousser mes analyses jusqu’à leur véritable achèvement, la fuite des gens dont le cas semblait le mieux se prêter à ce traitement (la psychanalyse), l’absence du succès total que j’escomptais et la possibilité de m’expliquer autrement, plus simplement, ces succès partiels, tout cela constituant un premier groupe de raisons. Puis, aussi la surprise de constater que, dans chacun des cas, il fallait accuser le père , et ceci sans exclure le mien, de perversion, la notion de la fréquence inattendue de l’hystérie où se retrouve chaque fois la même cause déterminante, alors qu’une telle généralisation des actes pervers commis envers des enfants semblait peu croyable.
Sigmund Freud, “Lettre du 21 septembre 1897” in Lettres à Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, PUF, Paris, 2015