Revisiting the Seduction Theory
Recovered memory in the era of trauma
By Tracy Sidesinger
Illustration by Austin Hughes
We have collectively entered the era of trauma: Pop culture, aided by neuropsychology, is obsessed with trauma, dysregulation, and developing resources for regulation and integration. We might cringe at every millennial’s confession that they were traumatized by having to wash the dishes, using this as an excuse to dismiss a global increase in the recognition of legitimate and pervasive trauma. And if we did dismiss it, that wouldn’t be surprising. Psychology and psychoanalysis have unhelpfully dismissed accounts of trauma as belonging only to the realm of fantasy for decades.
The dismissal of trauma is especially concerning when it comes to recovered memories—where there has been some period of amnesia followed by remembrance. Throughout the history of psychology, there have been different conceptions about the mental mechanism underlying amnesia, with repression and dissociation being the foremost. These conceptions are rooted in acceptance that amnesia for trauma can occur. However, at the same time, some psychoanalytic circles have seen the relationship between memory and reality as a wild-goose chase and altogether moot.
Despite identifying amnesia as one way the mind deals with trauma early on, psychoanalysis has a fraught history of reckoning with it. From 1897 when Freud pedaled back his seduction theory to the memory wars of the late 20th century, mainstream psychoanalysis has repeatedly chosen to privilege fantasy over reality. The party doctrine often frames psychoanalysis in terms of creating personal mythologies, centering the subjective in a manner consistent with postmodern skepticism about the possibility of veridical truth. By focusing on the internal mind, it is purported that psychoanalysis helps individuals engage what exists at the level of fantasy and thus develop their capacity for personal agency.
On the heels of second-wave feminism, which brought awareness of women’s oppression, and the Vietnam War, which brought awareness of trauma’s impact, the 1980s and 1990s saw an increase in public accounts of childhood trauma, including recovered memories of sexual abuse. As there was more safety to name such experiences in the public sphere, there was a natural movement among survivors to consider their trauma as a reality. However, even as one vein of psychology increasingly studied trauma and dissociation, another vein continued to reduce trauma to an internal experience. In many instances, dissociated traumatic memories have been denied altogether; in others, they are taken to be a matter of personal mythology irrespective of the veracity of accusations.
Sadly, that has amounted to a betrayal of abuse victims within the institution of psychoanalysis. Do survivors have any say in what their reality has been? Or are they always subject to those who claim there is no knowable reality?
Rather than see every father as perverse, [Freud] let all abusers off the hook.
In my first year of psychoanalytic training, I took an intro to theory and clinical practice class where the issue of trauma came up, almost as an aside. A heated topic in any case, it raised many feelings about what to do with trauma in a clinical setting. The analyst leading the class directed us to focus on the inner worlds of our patients. “What about rape?” I asked, “or abuse? Doesn’t what happens to a person matter?” They replied with what I learned was the classic psychoanalytic answer: “It doesn’t matter if a person was raped or not. Each person has their own internal world that is more than the sum of their encounters with reality. What we can work with is the inner fantasy of the individual.”
In that power differential of analyst and student, I didn’t win. I found myself leaning away from psychoanalytic circles after that class, as many I encountered in the field held a similar view. It felt necessary to preserve what I knew was true: Reality matters to the psyche.
To be sure, there are many within psychoanalysis who have recognized trauma, including past trauma that has resurfaced after being dissociated or repressed. Most importantly, these streams of thought have recognized the social-interpersonal dimensions of trauma and the importance of being able to locate them in real space-time in order to take on a person’s traumatic entanglements.
Dorothy Holmes has worked relentlessly in the area of cultural trauma, particularly around systemic racism as embedded and silenced trauma. Her famous 2016 paper’s subtitle reads, “The sleeping dog has awakened: Will psychoanalysis take heed?” Here she returns us to Freud’s notion that the psyche naturally has movements where major conflicts rest or are aroused, and that psychoanalysis’s job is to follow this movement. However, she noted, we have largely been unwilling to meet the moments when culture awakened to racialized traumas.
Francoise Davoine, coauthor of History Beyond Trauma, returns us to the premise that traumatic human experience often resides beyond language, but that psychoanalysis can give voice to silenced experiences and locate them within the social realm. Much of her work has focused on transgenerational or cultural trauma that has been internalized and appears as madness. That madness, however, is transformed when an external source of trauma can be spoken.
Jennifer Freyd, who researched the ways in which relationships of dependency impact psychic development when traumas occur, originated Betrayal Trauma Theory based on the finding that memory recall can be disrupted for survivors of abuse, particularly when the abuse has been perpetrated by a caregiver or parent on whom one depends. These results extrapolate beyond familial to institutional contexts—betrayals by those who are meant to provide safety have a worse impact than trauma occurring outside of close relationships.
It would be false to say psychoanalysis never considers the reality of interpersonal-social relationships and their impact upon the psyche. What does happen, however, is a dissociation. It’s as if we keep trying to forget that there was ever a notion of external, interpersonal, social reality impacting upon the psyche, and this recognition is left to emerge in dissociated factions outside of mainstream theory.
History of Recovered Memory
At the dawn of modern psychology, in 1896, Freud presented a radical theory: The cause of hysteria was sexual trauma. Freud’s clinical work suggested that his patients had undergone traumas in childhood so serious as to be repressed, and that their bodies were manifesting symptoms of their abuse that could be resolved when traumatic memories were made conscious. He called this the “Seduction Theory” to emphasize the role of external events in creating psychological distress. However, within a few years when the medical community around him was shamefully silent about childhood sexual abuse, Freud abandoned this theory, and trained psychology’s attention on internal fantasy instead. His search for a metatheory did not leave room for multiple causes and multiple realities. Rather than see every father as perverse, he let all abusers off the hook.
Jeffrey Masson, while employed in the archive of Freud’s writings and letters, saw evidence that Freud and those who came after him actively suppressed his theory, calling it a cover-up. Masson was fired from his job, and psychoanalytic theory continued to distance itself from the reality of external trauma.
There was a sense that my children needed to be kept safe from my family, even before I knew why.
A split has continued to exist in a field that does and undoes an understanding of the psyche as rooted in interpersonal experience. Masson observed that in his Canadian psychoanalytic training program, “We were taught that sexual abuse memories, particularly if they involved father/daughter incest, are almost always a wish, an impulse, a fantasy.” And at a psychoanalytic conference held in New York 100 years after Freud’s seduction theory, Robert Michaels voiced the majority opinion: “We are experts not in helping patients learn facts but in helping them construct useful myths. We are fantasy doctors, not reality doctors.” A search for truth was strictly forbidden. It seems I wasn’t the only one who experienced psychoanalysts as saying that the reality of experiences, even as severe as incest, doesn’t matter.
Their motives, by and large, have not been malevolent. Analysts’ own traumatic experiences were often too overwhelming to theorize. World War II saw a diaspora of psychoanalysts whose theorizing turned to ego-psychology in America, avoiding traumatic cultural realities and focusing on the strengths of the individual instead. Simultaneously, as Elizabeth Danto explains in Freud’s Free Clinics, clinics that offered free treatment with a social ethic flourished throughout Europe in the early 1900s but all closed by 1938. Where psychoanalysis survived, it pivoted toward private practice, turning a blind eye to those who couldn’t afford it and to the world outside.
Enter the Memory Wars, as they were called by the literary critic Frederick Crews. In the late 1980s, public accounts of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse skyrocketed, showing up in therapist’s offices, family confrontations, courtrooms, and the media. Psychologists ranging from Elizabeth Loftus to Bessel van der Kolk served as expert witnesses on how memory functions. Loftus argued for the malleability of memory and therefore the ability to implant false retrospective memories, while van der Kolk argued that traumatic memory functions differently than normal memory, eluding verbalization and residing more durably in the body.
By the time these memory wars arrived, psychology had already been through a few rounds of warring over what to do with memory, truth, and any individual’s sense of the impact of real-life events. These memory wars came mostly from outside the field, but they had a dissociative effect even inside it. Crews was the one to tie recovered memory specifically to psychoanalysis and Freud’s theory of repression, despite not having a background in clinical psychoanalysis, psychology, or medicine himself, and despite public accounts coming from many individuals who had no experience with psychoanalysis. The lived reality of traumatic experience—nascent in public recognition—was then repressed within psychoanalysis, psychology, and mainstream mental health as a whole.
For example, when Jennifer Freyd, who went on to develop Betrayal Trauma Theory, privately confronted her parents about her childhood abuse, her mother Pamela Freyd turned things public and retaliated. Pamela wrote, “I thought that therapists were supposed to help patients work to determine their own minds, not put them in conflict by suggesting that they do something contrary. Could a conflict between what she wanted and what her therapist expected have caused [my daughter] to act in such an unnatural and cruel way?” This letter initiated the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), initially comprising mainly people accused of abusing children, which created the term “recovered memory therapists.” Furthermore, a legislative act was introduced in 1995 (but never passed) that attempted to hold criminally liable any therapist whose patient came forward with an accusation of abuse. Rather than reckon with the complexities of memory, psychology was strongarmed into silencing abuse histories.
This subsequent shroud of silence created an environment where psychologists like Richard McNally at Harvard could say such things as, “Repressed memories are the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy.” The true catastrophe, however, lies in the unilateral perspective which wholesale denied emergent accounts of abuse. Today, when I informally survey recent psychology graduate students on what they learned about recovered memories, the responses can be flippant: “Oh, I thought that was debunked as junk science.” This is consistent with the finding by Bethany Brand and colleagues that graduate psychology textbooks routinely do not adequately or accurately discuss child maltreatment and trauma. Harold Lief, a psychoanalytic psychiatrist who was also on the board of the FMSF, posited that “trauma theory is beguiling”—charming but deceptive—on the basis that it tries to provide a “monotheory,” explaining everything through a trauma lens and taking away subjective, fantasied elements of experience.
In its worst form, psychology confused the question of memory to mean unilaterally that there is no such thing as history, at least when it comes to victims. As agents of unconscious attunement, helping patients make meaning and reckon with the limitations, possibilities, and complexities of their individual lives, we could do better.
Cultural Dissociation of Recovered Memories
There is a difference between letting sleeping dogs lie and forcing the dogs to sleep. Richard Chefetz writes that even some well-meaning psychoanalytic models of dissociation demonstrate “a lack of effort to know what could be known,” resulting in an active dissociation on the cultural level that impacts what individuals are capable of working through personally.
Individually, we remain blind to betrayals of safety and truth when these betrayals come from systems we’re dependent on. Dissociation is, after all, primarily a response to life threat. If there is some sense that we cannot survive in psychoanalysis if we admit to the reality of trauma and its impact on the psyche, we are likely to put its possibility out of conscious awareness. Too often, remaining in psychoanalysis has meant abandoning the seduction theory. But as traumatology, neuropsychology, and psychoanalysis increasingly intersect, there are re-associations in our thinking about dissociated childhood trauma, and I believe it is time to revisit Freud’s seduction theory.
Well, it’s about time, and by no means am I the first to say it. In their overview of legal, clinical, and academic settings, Henry Otgaar and colleagues observed that “the controversial issue of repressed memories is alive and well and may even be on the rise.” Some recent media pieces conflate the possibility of false memories and exaggerated claims with all reports of traumatic memory. In doing so, they seem belligerent and whack-a-mole, confused as to why recovered memory is still an issue, and intent on squashing these claims once and for all. “The Return of Recovered Memory,” published in Compact in 2022, is one such example, suggesting that this return should serve as a warning of wokeness on the rise.
However, it is also possible to ask the hard question, more akin to the complexity of thought that psychoanalysis ostensibly can provide: Why won’t the issue of recovered memory go away? Titles like “The Memory War” (2021, The Cut) and “How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory” (2021, The New Yorker) indicate that the issue isn’t resolved, no matter how much anyone wants it to be. Complex adult issues of consent and patriarchal suppression in high-profile #metoo cases like those of Harvey Weinstein and Brett Kavanaugh have been brought to the fore, reopening even harder questions about memory and sexual experience in childhood. Meanwhile, as L. M. Williams documents, research observes not only false recovered memories but also true recovered memories of victimization corroborated by earlier reports such as medical documentation.
If the issue of recovered memories has returned, one thing psychoanalysis can tell us is that the old way of attempted resolution—so long as it didn’t really resolve things—won’t work just by trying it again. We can’t simply treat recovered memories like they are all false. So what are we doing about recovered memories?
Recognizing and Repairing Institutional Betrayal
This year, Jennifer Freyd was awarded a lifetime achievement award for impact in psychology by the American Psychological Foundation. One of the accomplishments that she cites is drawing attention to institutional betrayal. This includes the dissociation from and denial of sexual abuse within institutions that people depend on for their success. One example includes cover-ups of assault within the Weinstein Company under the thrall of power and fear. But institutional betrayals also include institutional psychology and psychoanalysis, and the denial and dissociation from the reality of trauma that has happened there. In their letter honoring Jennifer Freyd’s lifetime achievement, Michael Salter, Jennifer Gómez, and Judith Herman noted that Freyd herself had been “grossly betrayed by academic psychology as a field,” when colleagues turned against her after her family abuse history and recovered memories were made public by her parents. All of this suggests that the time is ripe for psychoanalysis to reckon with its own betrayal of traumatic memories.
The DSM V offers some indication that this movement is happening. Based on a significant evidence base, Dissociative Amnesia is a named disorder; however, False Memory Syndrome is not recognized as an extant disorder.
Jennifer Freyd’s abuse memories started to emerge when she had young children—and so did mine. There was a sense that my children needed to be kept safe from my family, even before I knew why. Now that I work with mothers frequently, I know that this is not uncommon: Entering into motherhood disrupts a person’s defensive structures, bringing long-buried feelings and memories closer to the surface. Something else registers when you have children. They are another return of the repressed.
How do we think about infantile sexuality from the lens of maternal subjectivity? That is, from the mother-theorist, who brings her own experience to bear on thinking the child? There is eros in the love bond between child and mother, and there is mystery in the sexuality of any parental pair, but above all these, I think of one word to orient to the child’s sexuality: protection.
Those who have not endured abuse have the privilege of seeing sexuality as defined more than anything by the rules of fantasy, and of conceiving of memory as arbitrary. And even among those who have suffered such harm, fear and dissociation are factors in our own wishing that the real could be done away with.
Ideological Positions Don’t Serve Individuals
Our contemporary obsession with trauma has to do, at least in part, with a recognition that psychic functioning cannot completely be separated from external social-political-historical factors. And to the extent that these external realities can traumatize people, there is a need for witnessing of complex, lived experience rather than outright betrayal.
The point is not to have an ideological monotheory that says trauma explains either everything or nothing. The abandonment of the seduction theory did just that. I will admit that this is understandable. There are some traumas so painful that even those among us who make it our life’s work to engage human suffering need at times to create distance, denial, or dissociation. To countervail this, others have needed to embrace every account of trauma. These extreme ideological positions don’t serve survivors and in fact perpetuate dissociation.
Can we awaken to the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, relevant yet again in the form of recovered memories that won’t stop appearing? I certainly hope so—but in a way that preserves regard for the complex, multitudinous texture of psychic life. In re-associating psychoanalysis with trauma theory, we can honor the person as both a myth-making organism with a subjective internal world and a social-relational being that is constantly formed and reformed by these interactions.
Tracy Sidesinger, PsyD, is a psychoanalytic psychologist practicing in New York. She supports several organizations engaging psychoanalysis and trauma research in the public, including PsiAN, APsA, and ISSTD.
Further Reading
Brand, B. L., S. A. Kumar, and L. E. McEwen. “Coverage of Child Maltreatment and Adult Trauma in Graduate Psychopathology Textbooks.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 11, no. 8 (2019): 919–926.
Chefetz, R. A. “Re-Associating Psychoanalysis and Dissociation: A Review of Dissociation of Trauma: Theory, Phenomenology, and Technique.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 40, no. 1 (2004): 123-133.
Davoine, F., and J. Gaudilliere. History Beyond Trauma. Other Press, 2004.
Freyd, J. J. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Lief, H. I. “Questions Raised by the Controversy over Recovered Memories of Incest.” Psychodynamic Psychiatry 50, no. 1 (2022): 116–128.
Masson, J. The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.
Holmes, D. “Culturally Imposed Trauma: The Sleeping Dog Has Awakened. Will Psychoanalysis Take Heed?” International Journal of Relational Perspectives 26, no. 6 (2016): 641–654.
Otgaar et al. “The Return of the Repressed: The Persistent and Problematic Claims of Long-Forgotten Trauma.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 14, no. 6 (Nov. 2019): 1072–1095.
Solinsky, S. “Recovered Memories of Child Sexual Abuse: Forgetting to Remember and Remembering to Forget, Part 1: A Perennial Controversy.” Frontiers in the Psychotherapy of Trauma and Dissociation 4, no. 1 (2020): 17–27.
Williams, L. M. “Recovered Memories of Abuse in Women with Documented Child Sexual Victimization Histories.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 8, no. 4 (1995): 649–673.
Published August 2024