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as etiological, he swayed back and forth, though despite all doubts in regards to the psychic consequences of remembered traumatic seduction, he did adhere to one idea from 1897 onwards, namely that his patient’s “neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful fantasies, and that, as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material reality” (Freud 1925, p. 34). To him, the concept of trauma was now opposed to the idea of infantile, drive-driven wishful fantasies rooted in the “inner” world, conflictually settled between unconditional desire and prohibition. Here, the rational subject of enlightenment is meeting an ego, driven by unconscious wishes, responding to an environment on which he/she is extremely dependent at the beginning of life. The interface of this crucial dynamic is the Oedipal conflict caused by love and hate impulses towards our primary objects. In 1925 he remembered, “I had in fact stumbled for the first time upon the Oedipus complex , which was later to assume such an overwhelming importance, but which I did not recognize as yet in its disguise of fantasy” (Freud 1925, p. 34, original emphasis). The outcome of the conflictual Oedipal crises is constitutive for the dynamics of psychic life and its manifestations. On the subject of trauma vis-a-vis conflict , Freud took different positions. For example, previously in his lectures he pointed out “that between the intensity and pathogenic importance of infantile and of later experiences a complemental relationship exists similar to the series we have already discussed. There are cases in which the whole weight of causation falls on the sexual experiences of childhood, cases in which those impressions exert a definitely traumatic effect and call for no other support than can be afforded them by an average sexual constitution and the fact of its incomplete development. Alongside of these cases there are others in which the whole accent lies on the later conflicts and the emphasis we find in the analysis laid on the impressions of childhood appears entirely as the work of regression. Thus we have extremes of ‘developmental inhibition’ and ‘regression’ and between them every degree of cooperation between the two factors” (Freud, 1916-1917, p. 364). In his retrospection from 1925 he referred only to his discovery of the wishful aspect in infantile fantasies: “I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them” (Freud 1925, p. 33). On the overall, as the psychoanalytic theory and theory of pathogenesis would become gradually more complex in Freud’s formulations, the notion of conflict in relation to trauma, its multiple causes and consequences would acquire additional ‘over determined’ and ‘complemental’ character: The concept of traumatic powerful excitations from the outside breaking through the protective shield or external stimulus barrier (Freud, 1920) gradually receded in favour of definition of trauma as ego helplessness in the face of real or imagined, internal or external danger (Freud, 1926), which could occur at any period of life, with Ego immaturity predisposing the individual to helplessness. Are neurotic productions tied in with real, even traumatic experiences or wishful fantasies? The question of which is “true”, the authenticity of the seduction scenes or their fictitious nature runs through the entirety of psychoanalytic theory (Rand & Torok, 1996, 305) and the complexity of their intertwining is best illustrated in Freud’s clinical cases (Freud 1905b; 1909a,b; 1910a; 1911b; 1918). Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (1987, 2000) points out that it
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