In response to Eric Gillett's post:
 
I didn't claim that the major theoretical issue underlying Freud's
shifting views around 1900 was the ratio of neurosis with environmental
abuse in the etiology vs. otherwise. That was what his opinion changed
about (he came to believe that there were fewer than he had once
believed) but it was not the major theoretical issue. The major issue
was psychic reality and the whole panoply of issues that surround it. I
think that's fairly clear in my original post.
 
Eric does raise an important issue towards the end of his message: the
extent and rigidity of the view that neurotics who thought they had been
abused are seldom right in the literature subsequent to Freud, in
particular in American ego psychology. For myself, I am *not* sure that
all of this or even a lot of it can be laid at Freud's feet -- I have
often thought that he was more nuanced on an issue than his disciples came
to be -- but the phenomenon itself is clearly important.
 
Incidentally, analysts' reactions to Masson seem to me a counter-example
to Eric's claims about controversy-phobia in the analytic community. In
the years after `Assault ...' almost every opinion one could conceive of
about Freud's behavior and motives, the nature of the issues, the truth
about environmental vs. purely psychic trauma and so on and so on were
canvassed in the psychoanalytic literature and many controversial positions
were expressed by very major figures.
 
 
 --
 
Andrew Brook, Professor of Philosophy
Director, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies
Member, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
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