Emma Eckstein - Seduction Theory

Seduction Theory

Eckstein is also associated with Freud's seduction theory. In 1897, Freud cites her analytic findings to Fliess as support for his 'so-called seduction theory, the claim that all neuroses are the consequences of an adult's, usually a father's, sexual abuse of a child'. Freud wrote that 'Eckstein deliberately treated her patient in such a manner as not to give her the slightest hint of what would emerge from the unconscious and in the process obtained from her...the identical scenes with the father'.

Jeffrey Masson in his assault on Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory makes much of Eckstein's role, linking Freud's "abandonment" of her position with respect to the Fliess surgery to his "abandonment" of her evidence for the paternal etiology of neurosis: for 'the idea - which even Masson concedes is crazy - that...all neurotic patients had been sexually abused'.

Yet while few (since Schur) would dissent that in regard to the failed surgery 'Freud's evasiveness is blatant....Freud was eager to protect Fliess from the obvious charge of careless, almost fatal malpractice', there is at the same time much to suggest that 'as far as the seduction theory is concerned, Eckstein is a red herring...no more relevant than Freud's other patients. The fact that Masson lavishes so much attention on her... Emma Eckstein is for him a woman whom Freud and Fliess abused. She is thus the prototypical psychoanalytic victim...this symbolic function'.