Was Freud a Liar?

Frank Cioffi 1

The Listener, and broadcast over the BBC.

The story of how Sigmund Freud discovered

the Oedipus Complex and thus the main source of
neurotic tribulation is a celebrated one, which has
fired imaginations and warmed hearts from the
shores of Asia to the Edgeware Road. Let me
remind you of how it goes.
In the mid-nineties of the last century, Freud, a
Viennese physician who specialized in the
treatment of nervous disorders, had a succession of
patients who recalled an occasion in infancy in
which they had been sexually molested, usually by
one of their own parents. This came as a great
shock to Freud as he had no inkling of the
pathogenic potency of sexual life and was, indeed,
reluctant to credit it. Nevertheless he believed his
patients' stories and when he had heard about a
dozen or so he duly reported that he had
discovered the specific cause of psychoneurotic
disorder: a passive sexual experience before
puberty. In other words, a seduction.
Let me continue the story in the words of
Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones. "(Freud) found
that several of the seduction
stories
were
simply untrue,

there had been no seduction. But he held fast to

the fact that the patient had told him these stories .
. . with the result that he discovered the
importance of infantile fantasy life in the genesis
of the neuroses."
How did Freud do this? How did he turn the
seduction mistake into a discovery about the role
of parents in infantile fantasy? Well, the story continues, Freud brilliantly penetrated the patients'
false memories of being seduced by a parent and
found concealed behind them their own infantile
wishes for sexual relations with the parent.
In this talk I want to persuade you that with the
exception of the claim that Freud was practicing
medicine in Vienna during the nineties this story
has about as much historicity as that of George
Washington and the cherry tree, or King Alfred
and the cakes.
The truth of the matter can be briefly stated
though not briefly documented. Freud did not base
his seduction theory on stories of infantile
seduction related by his patients. In any case his
patients did not tell him any fictitious seduction
stories. And the seduction stories of whose truth
they were eventually persuaded did not normally
involve parents

1 University of Essex, Dept. of Philosophy, Wivenhoe

Park, Colchester C04 3SQ. This was first published in

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and so are unlikely to have been transformations

of fantasies concerning parents. Further, Freud
could not, for a variety of reasons, have been
surprised by the discovery that his patients'
illnesses had sexual causes. Rather it is likely that
it was Freud's own preconceptions concerning
the influence of sexual life that incited his
patients to accept a sexual cause for their difficulties.
I think what really happened was this: At first
Freud was exhilarated by the way in which his
patients produced confirmation for his seduction
theory. Then he discovered that some of the
seductions had never happened. He had been
warned by the reviewers of his first book on
hysteria of the serious risk that his method
produced false convictions in his patients as to
the correctness of his explanations. And his
critics, it seemed, were right. What a humiliation!
Freud now put all his enormous resourcefulness
into mitigating if not entirely evading it. When he
had finished he had persuaded himself that in his
own words "not the analysis but the patient must.
. . bear the responsibility for this unexpected
disappointment." How did he manage it?
Freud had to account for the consistency with
which he had arrived at the seduction scenes.
They had to be fantasies for the alternative was
that they had been suggested by Freud, or worse,
arbitrarily imputed by him. Freud's predicament
can be presented in the form of a dilemma. Either
the seductions were authentic or Freud's method
of reconstructing the infantile past of his patients
was invalid. But many of the seductions had
proved fictitious, so it must have been Freud's
method that was invalid.
Freud solved this dilemma by falsifying one
of its horns. It then became "Either the seductions
are authentic or my patients are self-deceived and
their confessions false. But the seductions are
fictitious, therefore my patients' confessions are
false.'' He was now almost ready to face the
world. But there was still a difficulty. Might not
the alleged confessions of his patients be
attributed to their suggestibility? Might the confessions not be the result of his own

preconceived views as to the role of sexuality in

nervous disorders? Freud resolved this difficulty
by obliterating from his consciousness the fact
that he had any preconceived views as to the
influence of sexuality.
It is an established part of psychoanalytic
folklore that Freud came slowly and reluctantly to
an acknowledgement of the role of sexuality in the
production of neurotic illness. And like most
psychoanalytic folklore it derives directly from
Freud's repeated assertions of it. But it is
completely untrue. Freud was searching for the
sources of neurotic disorders in the sexual life of
his patients before he began practicing psychoanalysis even in its most primitive and
rudimentary forms. And by the mid-nineties when
he put forward the seduction theory he was
already subjecting his patients to an aggressive
cross-examination as to their sexual habits.
We are all familiar with the way in which
legends grow imperceptibly more and more
remote from the historical facts. The striking thing
about the legend of Freud's progression from real
seduction to oedipal fantasies is that it did not
grow. It sprang fully armed from the brow of
Freud. And so it confronts us with the
embarrassing but unavoidable questionwas
Freud a liar? In attempting to account for the
grossness of the discrepancy between Freud's
accounts of the seduction episode and what really
happened I did not overlook the possibility that
Freud simply lied. I finally rejected it because it is
more plausible to assume that Freud suffered a
massive amnesia than that he foolishly gave
accounts which are so blatantly incompatible with
the published evidence.
And what makes it even more likely that in
Freud's case we have, not lies, but memory errors
is that we know Freud to have been particularly
prone to such memory errors. There was, for
example, the cocaine episode. Freud had been an
uncritical advocate of the medical value of
cocaine when it was first introduced in the early
eighties. He defended himself from the criticism
which followed the
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perhaps too charitably.

discovery of its danger by arguing that these

dangers were conditional on
its being
administered by injection. When administered by
mouth, as Freud himself had advocated, it was
harmless. In fact Freud had advocated the
administration of cocaine by injection. Not only
did Freud overlook this in his reply to
criticism, but he seems to have become
permanently amnesic with respect to it. The topic
of cocaine comes up again in Freud's associations
to the dream which inaugurated the psychoanalytic
study of dreamsthe dream of Irma's injection.
One of the themes of this dream was the injurious
effects of cocaine. In his associations Freud
repeated that he had never advocated its use by
injection. It seems that dream analysis, which
is capable of plumbing the depths of the
unconscious, is nevertheless not able to uncover
common or garden self-deception.2
So far I have merely shown that there is nothing
extravagant in putting down Freud's grossly
distorted account of the seduction episode to a
failure of memory. But I have not yet shown that
Freud's account was grossly distorted.
My first thesis is thisthat the seduction stories
were related by Freud to his patients, and not to
Freud by his patients. First let me show that it is
untrue to hold, as Freud later insisted, . that his
patients told him imaginary seduction stories. In
the course of attempting to allay suspicions that
his patients may have wilfully deceived him,
Freud said of their attitude towards the seductions
that "whilst calling these infantile experiences into
consciousness . . . they still try to withhold belief
by emphasizing the fact that they had no feeling of
recollecting these scenes."
So before Freud discovered that the seductions
were imaginary he was describing them as
experiences which his patients had no feeling of
recollecting.

After he had discovered that the seductions had

not occurred, he described them as "the deceptive
memories of hysterics concerning their
childhood." How can these two accounts be reconciled?
In the next sentence Freud went on to urge
against the view that the seduction stories were
fabrications the fact that "patients assure me . . .
emphatically of their unbelief." This implies that
not only were his patients not recollecting the
seductions, but that they were not even convinced
that the seductions happened. And how is this to
be reconciled with the active role Freud later
assigned to his patients in phrases like: "hysterics
trace back their symptoms to fictitious traumas"
or patients "ascribe their symptoms to passive
sexual experiences in early childhood." Was it not
Freud himself who did the tracing and the
ascribing?
Just so you won't think I am making too much
of a fuss about this let me quote as evidence of the
pervasiveness of the view that Freud's patients
related seduction episodes to him some remarks by
a distinguished critic, Lionel Trilling: "We recall
that dramatic moment in the development of
psychoanalysis when Freud accepted as literally
true the stories told him by so many of his early
patients of having been, as children, sexually
assaulted or seduced by adults, often by their own
parents . . . We know how his patients rewarded
his credulity, scarcely any of them were telling the
truth. They had betrayed- Freud into constructing a
hypothesis on the basis of their stories . . . And so
Freud had reason to think very harshly of his
patients if he wished to . . ."
This brings us to another reason for holding that
Freud unconsciously fabricated the patients'
confessions. In his retrospective accounts Freud
tells us that the patients' delusions of seduction
usually pertained to parents. But in the original
seduction papers themselves the cast list includes
nursemaids, governesses, domestic servants,
teachers, tutors, older children, and even brothers,
but no parents. The claim that it is the parents who
are

2 It is incorrect to say, as I did, that in his report of the

Irma dream Freud denies having ever recommended the
administration of cocaine by injection. What is striking
about it, rather, is that Freud fails to produce any
associations to the theme of injection reminding him of
this painful fact. I assumed that he had none rather than
that he deliberately suppressed mention of them

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the seducers is not only not made in the original

seduction papers, it is inconsistent with them.
Freud there says that in seven of the cases it was
brothers who were the seducers, and since brothers
are as identifiable as parents the motive for this
discrepancy can hardly be discretion.
By the way, even if the seduction beliefs of
Freud's patients had uniformly pertained to the
cross-sex parent it is not obvious why this is a
natural transformation of infantile fantasies about
seducing the cross-sex parents. Freud is very
unforthcoming as to why this should be so. He
merely asserts that the seduction memories are less
wounding to the patient than the acknowledgement
of his own incestuous infantile inclinations. But is
the thought that you were sexually used by your
mother really less disagreeable than the thought
that you once desired her? I have not found
anyone who felt so, but I am struck by the way in
which people who gabble happily about the
Oedipus Complex are mildly affronted if you
attempt to introduce a degree of particularity into
the discussion.
And since the imputed fantasies are
unconscious in any case, why isn't that sufficient
protection against self-reproach? Why the
additional precaution of inverting them and giving
the parents the active role actually taken by the
child? You mustn't even ask.
Still, so far I have merely shown that Freud's
patients did not relate stories of seduction and not
that Freud did. My reasons for maintaining this are
largely circumstantial. First there is the matter of
Freud's tremendous confidence in his diagnostic
powers combined with a most unpsychological
reluctance to credit the power of suggestibility.
This is what he said in his book on hysteria,
published in 1895, a year before the three
seduction theory papers: "We need not be afraid of
telling the patient what we think his next. . .
thought is going to be. It will do no harm." Within
a year of this remark he had stumbled into the
seduction blunder.
One bit of evidence that it was Freud's practice
to communicate his seduction suspicions to his
patients comes from the analysis of one of his own

dreams. In the dream Freud reproaches a patient

for not accepting his explanation as to why she
was ill and blames the persistence of her illness on
this refusal. In his associations to this item Freud
says that the reproach in the dream was probably
just a repetition of a reproach he had made his
patient in waking life. Freud goes on to add: "It
was my view at this time . . . that my task was
fulfilled when I had informed the patient of the
hidden meaning of his symptoms." But this dream
was the dream of Irma's injection, and since we
know the exact date of that dream we can state
that Irma was one of Freud's original batch of
presumably seduced patients. Is it rash to infer that
the "hidden meaning of the symptoms" about
which Freud made it a practice to inform his
patients at that time was a sexual seduction in
infancy? You may think this a bit thin. So let me
see if I can do better.
During the period when Freud thought he was
receiving daily confirmation of his seduction
hypothesis, a patient confessed to him that when a
young girl she had been the victim of a sexual
assault by her father. "Naturally," Freud wrote to
the correspondent to whom he related the incident,
"she did not find it incredible when I told her that
similar and worse things must have happened to
her in infancy."
This was from a letter to his friend Fliessand
you can see why Freud wanted this
correspondence destroyed!
One of the questions that the seduction story
presents us with is this: How did Freud come "by
the discovery that the seduction theory was false?
Once again Freud has a ready answer, and once
again it is completely untrue. When Freud first
publicly admitted the seduction error, nine years
later, he explained it as follows: "I did not then
know that persons who remain normal may have
had the same experiences in their childhood . . ."
But he did know. In the original papers he wrote:
"We have heard and acknowledged that there are
many people who have a very clear recollection of
infantile sexual experiences and yet do not suffer
from hysteria." Why this
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discrepancy?
In this account Freud is explaining his
discovery of the seduction error in terms of his
realization thatas he put it "persons who
remain normal may have had the same experiences
in childhood." This makes it sound as if the
seduction error consisted only in the rashness of
Freud's extrapolating to hysterics in general
and not in attributing false histories of
seductions to his own patients. The measure of
Freud's inability to come to terms with the
seduction error is to be found in the earlier portion
of the sentence I quoted which says, astonishingly,
of the seductions, "I cannot admit that I
exaggerated their frequency or their importance . .
." It had taken Freud nine years to bring himself to
publicly admit the seduction error, and when it
came to the point he funked it. Why? From the
same motive which led him to make the false
assertion that his confidence in the reality of the
seductions was based on
his
patients'
confidence in them. This flatly contradicts what
he said at the time which was, "We adhere to the
principle of not adopting the patients' belief
without a thorough critical examination."
How then did Freud convince himself of the
reality of the seductions? In his own words "by
letting the symptoms tell the tale." Far from basing
his conviction on the patients' testimony Freud
argued that, just as a physician can explain how a
physical injury has been caused without any
information from the injured person, so in hysteria
the analyst can penetrate from the symptoms to
their causeswithout the testimony of the patient.
Why should Freud have gone to such lengths to
conceal from himself the real basis of his
confidence in the reality of the infantile
seductions? For a perfectly understandable reason.
Freud could not bring himself to recognize the
reasoning by which he had persuaded himself of
the authenticity of the seductions because it was
the same sort of reasoning which for the rest of his
career he was to employ in his reconstruction of
infantile fantasy life and of the content of the
unconscious in general. This emerges

clearly in one of the original seduction papers in

which Freud urges against skepticism concerning
the seductions the fact that "patients appeared to
live through it with all the appropriate emotions."
Let me sum up. Freud did not fall into the
seduction error through believing his patients'
stories; he did not fall into it through ignorance of
the fact that persons sexually molested in infancy
may, nevertheless, not succumb to neurosis; he did
not fall into it through underestimating the
frequency of seduction in the general population.
Freud fell into the seduction error through the use
of a procedure which to this day remains the basis
of the psychoanalytic reconstruction of infantile
life: the attribution to patients of certain infantile
experiences because they appear to the analyst to
be living "through them with all the appropriate
emotions."
The lesson Freud ought to have learned from
the discovery that the infantile seductions which
he believed to be the specific cause of the
psychoneurosis were often fictitious was not that
infantile fantasy life is as important in the genesis
of neurotic illness as actual infantile events, but
that Freud's method of eliciting from patients their
infantile histories, and more important still, his
method of interpreting these elicitations, was an
unreliable one which leads to mistaken
reconstructions that deceive not only the physician
but the patient himself.
But instead of modifying his procedure so as to
lessen the risk of mistaken inferences Freud
merely made the inferences themselves so
indeterminate that the validity of his methods
could never again be placed in jeopardy. Freud,
like the Emperor in the story, dealt with bad news
by having the bearer executed. Before you
mechanically reject the blasphemous suggestion
ask yourself the following question: What could
overthrow Freud's later theories of the infantile
sources of neurotic illness as the fictitious
character of the seductions overthrew the
seduction theory? The history of psychoanalytic
disputes over the nature of infantile mental life is
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largely a history of mutual recrimination. What

else could an orthodox Freudian say to Kleinian
revisionists but that their nonsense didn't suit his
nonsense?
The history of psychoanalysis is full of ironies.
It seems that Freud, the apostle of self-knowledge,
the relentless seeker after truth, was no better at
detecting his own essays in self-deception than the
rest of us. There is an aphorism of Nietzsche's
which Freud quoted on several occasions to
illustrate the affinity between Nietzsche's thought
and his own: "I did this says my Memory, I cannot
have done this says my Pride, and remains
inexorable. In the end Memory yields." On several
occasions in after years Freud attempted to
reconstruct the considerations which had led him
to assert first that a sexual seduction and then that
incestuous fantasy lay at the root of every psychoneurosis. In this talk I have tried to show that
whenever he made this attempt Freud's pride
would not yield and it was memory that lost.

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