Seduction

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definition

The "scene of seduction" connotes attempts at seduction, real or fantasied, in the form of advances, incitations, manipulations, or suggestions that are actively initiated by an adult vis-à-vis a child who is passive, even frightened.

The "theory of seduction" was a metapsychological model worked out by Sigmund Freud between 1895 and 1897 and then abandoned; it assigned an etiological role in the production of psychoneuroses to memories of actual seduction attempts. In 1893, bolstered by the accounts given him by his patients, Freud spoke of seduction as a clinical discovery. During the period 1895-1897, based on these clinical observations, he worked out a theory designed to explain the repression of infantile sexuality. On September 21, 1897, in a well-known letter to Wilhelm Fliess, he laid out his reasons for abandoning this model (1950a, pp. 259-260). This whole episode is eminently instructive from an epistemological as from a heuristic point of view, and is worth reviewing.

On May 30, 1893, Freud wrote to Fliess: "I believe I understand the anxiety neuroses of young people who must be regarded as virgins with no history of sexual abuse" (1950c, p. 73). This was his first allusion to the role of sexual seduction, still very broad in its application. In "Draft H," dated January 24, 1895, he presented the following narrative: "He had called her up to the bed, and, when she unsuspectingly obeyed, put his penis in her hand. There had been no sequel to the scene, and soon afterwards the stranger had gone off. In the course of the next few years the sister who had had this experience fell ill. . . . I endeavored to cure her tendency to paranoia by trying to reinstate the memory of the scene. I failed in this. . . . She wished not to reminded of it and consequently intentionally repressed it. . . . She had probably really been excited by what she had seen and by its memory.... The judgment about her had been transposed outwards: people were saying what otherwise she would have said to herself" (1950a, pp. 207-209). Here then we have seduction, repression, and the foreshadowing of rejection, or what would much later be called foreclosure. On October 15, 1895, Freud wrote enthusiastically to Fliess: "Have I revealed the great clinical secret to you, either in writing or by word of mouth? Hysteria is the consequence of a presexual sexual shock. Obsessional neurosis is the consequence of a presexual sexual pleasure later transformed into guilt. 'Presexual' means before puberty, before the production of the sexual substance; the relevant events become effective only as memories" (1895c, p. 127). On May 30, 1896, he distinguished the periods of life in which the event occurred from those in which repression came into play (1950a, pp. 229-231); and on May 2, 1897, with reference to fantasies in hysteria, he elaborated: "all their material is, of course, genuine. They are protective structures, sublimations of the facts, embellishments of them, and at the same time serve for self-exoneration. Their precipitating origin is perhaps from masturbation fantasies" (p. 247). The references to "structures," "embellishments," and "fantasies" indicate clearly that Freud was becoming increasingly dubious. In "Draft L," an attachment to this last-cited letter, he went on: "The aim seems to be to arrive [back] at the primal scenes. In a few cases this is achieved directly, but in others only by a roundabout path, via phantasies. For phantasies are psychical façades constructed in order to bar the way to these memories. Phantasies at the same time serve the trend towards refining the memories, towards sublimating them" (p. 248). Truth to tell, the great revision was already under way.

In the famous letter to Fliess of September 21, 1897, Freud wrote: "I will confide in you at once the great secret that has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months. I no longer believe in my neurotica. This is probably not intelligible without an explanation. . . . Then came surprise at the fact that in every case the father, not excluding my own [a phrase long censored by successive editors of the Freud-Fliess papers], had to be blamed as a pervert . . . though such a widespread extent of perversity towards children is, after all, not very probable" (p. 259). Freud now realized that scenes of seduction could be the product of reconstructions in fantasy whose purpose was to conceal the child's autoerotic activity. This was a historic moment in the shaping of psychoanalysis, rich in lessons about Freud's creative functioning and typical of the tendency of his innovative thinking to be overtaken by its own development, often changing course when faced by contrary evidence but always anchored in clinical experience. Freud's self-analysis, undertaken in the preceding months, following the death of his father, certainly made it possible for him to carry through this radical break, to approach the discovery of the Oedipus complex, and eventually to reject his seduction hypothesis as false. Much later, in 1924, he would write the following in a footnote to his "Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence" (1896b): "At that time I was not yet able to distinguish between my patients' phantasies about their childhood years and their real recollections. As a result, I attributed to the aetiological factor of seduction a significance and universality which it did not possess. When this error had been overcome, it became possible to obtain an insight into the spontaneous manifestations of the sexuality of children which I described in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d)" (p. 168n). A return to clinical observation was thus mandatory, and Freud had no theoretical alternative in the end but to assign seduction to the category of those primal fantasies whose origin he ascribed to the prehistory of humanity.

In the first Freudian clinical doctrine, the child at birth was naïve, innocent, and when confronted by the sexuality of the other perceived it as external, foreign, and strange: this was the context of the seduction theory; in Freud's second clinical doctrine, the child was acknowledged to be the "polymorphously perverse," inherent possessor of a primitive sexuality, destined to unfold in its interactions with its human surround. But while, historically speaking, infantile sexuality thus replaced seduction (scene and theory), it never obliterated it completely, and both clinical views continued to be discernible within psychoanalytic treatment, as Freud himself frequently pointed out from the Three Essays to the Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]).

==definition==Since l'objet petit a is the object of psychoanalysis, no wonder that we encounter a parallax gap in the very core of psychoanalytic experience. When Jean Laplanche elaborates the impasses of the Freudian topic of seduction, he effectively reproduces the precise structure of a Kantian antinomy. On the one hand, there is the brutal empirical realism of the parental seduction: the ultimate cause of later traumas and pathologies is that children effectively were seduced and molested by adults; on the other hand, there is the (in)famous reduction of the seduction scene to the patient's fantasy. As Laplanche points out, the ultimate irony is that the dismissal of seduction as fantasy passes today for the "realistic" stance, while those who insist on the reality of seduction end up advocating all kind of molestations, up to satanic rites and extra-terrestrial harassments... Laplanche's solution is precisely the transcendental one: while "seduction" cannot be reduced just to subject's fantasy, while it does refer to a traumatic encounter of the other's "enigmatic message," bearing witness to the other's unconscious, it also cannot be reduced to an event in the reality of the actual interaction between child and his/her adults. Seduction is rather a kind of transcendental structure, the minimal a priori formal constellation of the child confronted with the impenetrable acts of the Other which bear witness to the Other's unconscious - and we are never dealing here with simple "facts," but always with facts located into the space of indeterminacy between "too soon" and "too late": the child is originally helpless, thrown into the world when unable to take care of itself, i.e., his/her surviving skills develop too late; at the same time, the encounter of the sexualized Other always, by a structural necessity, comes "too soon," as an unexpected shock which cannot ever be properly symbolized, translated into the universe of meaning.[1] The fact of seduction is thus that of the Kantian transcendental X, a structurally-necessary transcendental illusion.[2]

  1. See Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1989.
  2. The Parallax View


    See Also

    References

    1. See Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1989.
    2. The Parallax View


      See Also

      References

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      1. Freud, Sigmund. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence. SE, 3: 157-185.
      2. ——. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.
      3. ——. (1925d [1924]). An autobiographical study. SE, 20: 1-74.
      4. —— (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE, 23: 139-207.
      5. ——. (1950a [1887-1902]). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173-280.
      6. ——. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology. SE, 1: 281-387.
    1. Freud, Sigmund. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence. SE, 3: 157-185.
    2. ——. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.
    3. ——. (1925d [1924]). An autobiographical study. SE, 20: 1-74.
    4. —— (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE, 23: 139-207.
    5. ——. (1950a [1887-1902]). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173-280.
    6. ——. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology. SE, 1: 281-387.