Child Sexual Abuse - Freud

The first person to present childhood sexual abuse as a source of psychological problems was Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Early in his career Freud proposed that the hysteria he saw in some of his patients was the result of childhood sexual abuse. He thought his patients' symptoms represented symbolic manifestations of their repressed sexual memories. Freud later changed his mind, denying that he thought sexual abuse had taken place. Instead, he proposed that young children have an unconscious sexual attachment to the parent of the opposite sex and a sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex. This is called the Oedipus complex in males and the Electra complex in females. In other words, the adult's memories of incestuous experiences were remnants of his or her childhood desires to be seduced by an adult. Freud theorized that, under the normal psychological development process, the child starts to identify with the parent of the same sex. He claimed that if this does not occur, the individual will develop personality disorders in adulthood.

Some scholars have proposed that Freud revised his theory because he was pressured by colleagues to recant. Psychoanalyst Alice Miller claimed that Freud suppressed the truth so that he, his colleagues, and men in Viennese society would be spared having to examine their own histories. Some experts believe that the testimonies Freud originally elicited from his patients were cases of incestuous abuse. Others believe that he changed his theory to preserve his concept of repression, on which he based the whole structure of psychoanalysis.