NEUROTICA

Freud created the neologism neurotica to refer to his first approach to the etiology of the neuroses. The word appears only once in Freud's writing, in a letter to Fliess dated September 21, 1897. In an earlier letter, dated January 24, 1897, Freud had introduced a similar neologism: "The majority of my assumptions on the neuroticis were subsequently confirmed." The September 21 letter, however, is more pessimistic: "And now I must immediately reveal to you the great secret that, during these past months, has slowly begun to become clear. I no longer believe in my neurotica."

According to Freud's neurotica, the etiology of the neuroses unfolds in three stages:

1. Some form of sexual abuse was committed by someone close to the person, possibly a parent. Freud placed the abuse in adolescence and then traced backward in time to place it in childhood and even early infancy.
2. The scene involving the abuse is repressed.
3. The repressed traumatic scene has a tendency to reappear in the form of anxiety or symbolic acts. This leads to the well-known formulation that "hysterics suffer from reminiscences." It is the father's perversion that is responsible for the neurosis of the child: "Hysteria is the negative of perversion."

It is this conception of the traumatic etiology of the neurotica that Freud questioned in his September 21 letter to Fliess. The generalization about the perversion of fathers now seemed unlikely to Freud, who claimed, "There are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect. (Accordingly, there would remain the solution that the sexual fantasy invariably seizes upon the theme of the parents.)" This led Freud to a new conception of the etiology of neurosis, a conception based on fantasy rather than trauma.

No sooner had Freud finished his letter to Fliess questioning his neurotica theory than he hastened to Berlin to meet Fliess and clarify his position. Freud returned to Vienna in a state of great intellectual agitation, filled with dreams, reminiscences, and parapraxes associated with conversations between himself and his mother about his childhood. An intense two-week period of mental scrutiny resulted in Freud's discovery of the Oedipus complex. The question of what is prominent is the origin of the neurosis, actual real events or psychic reality, combined to preoccupy Freud throughout his scientific life (see the "Wolf Man" case, 1918b [1914]).

Freud's abandoning his neurotica later gave rise to a number of comments, critiques, and developments. Marie Balmary and Marianne Krüll have investigated, from a psychoanalytic point of view, what drove Freud to abandon the seduction theory. They explained his abandonment not in terms of scientific motives but rather in terms of Freud's relationship with his father, and they saw his abandoning the theory as an attempt to protect his father. In a more polemical vein, Jeffrey M. Masson has reproached Freud for abandoning this theory out of cowardice before his Viennese colleagues and denying the reality of the sexual abuse whose victims were girls and women. Jean Laplanche addressed the problem from the opposite point of view and provided an original interpretation that ranges from limited to generalized seduction. He saw the seduction as coming not from the father but from the mother and considers the seduction to be "a fundamental situation, where the adult proposes to the child non-verbal and verbal, even behavioral, signifiers impregnated with unconscious sexual meanings."

Didier Anzieu

See also: Construction de l'espace analytique (La-) (Constructing the analytical space); Family; Fantasy; "Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses"; Mythology and psychoanalysis; Psychic causality; Psychic reality; Seduction; Sexual trauma.

Bibliography

Balmary, Marie. (1982). Psychoanalyzing psychoanalysis: Freud and the hidden fault of the father (Ned Lukacher, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1979)

Freud, Sigmund. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile neurosis. SE, 17: 1-122.

——. (1950a [1887-1902]). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173-280.

Krüll, Marianne. (1986). Freud and his father (Arnold J. Pomerans, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1979)

Laplanche, Jean. (1989). New foundations for psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. (Original work published 1987)

Masson, Jeffrey M. (1984). The assault on truth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Robinson, Paul A. (1993). Freud and his critics. Berkeley: University of California Press.