This is a not entirely accurate account even of Masson's inaccurate account (I write as a personal friend of Masson, but also as a Freud researcher, who -- as I have told Masson since 1985, the year after his "seduction theory" book The Assault on Truth appeared  -- finds Masson's treatment of the "seduction theory" superficial). Freud began (in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess) to admit doubts about his own so-called (not by him) "seduction theory" on 21 September 1897, some 17 months after he had announced it in the spring of 1896 in two papers and a lecture. At that time there was no "psychoanalytic inner circle". There was only one psychoanalyst in the world, Freud himself. He had only invented the name "psychoanalysis" in precisely the three so-called "seduction theory" papers of 1896, and there were no other practitioners of whatever "psychoanalysis" denoted. Breuer was no longer practising what he had described (in Studies on Hysteria, 1895) doing with "Anna O." from 1880-1882, and in any case Breuer never called that "psychoanalysis", although Freud on one occasion (America, 1909), did.

 

Would not this list's fine scholarly culture be better served if all of us checked primary sources before writing?

 

Anthony Stadlen