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(03/11/2015) ✕

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Silently he approached me and tried to embrace
me. I tried to free myself but he seized me all the
harder. I screamed, but no one came!                                                                                                                          (Donna Anna in Don Giovanni)

The little rose fought thus and pricked,
No prose of pain could help her,
Alas, she must suffer it yet.
(Little Rose of the Field, Goethe)


Disorder and Early Sorrow: The story is only too well known
In the early 1890s Freud was in his medical practice often faced with patients who talked about having suffered sexual abuse by related parties. First he took this finding, as an indication of an alarming show of domestic violence situation. But then he became skeptical. Maybe some narrators were not victims of male violence? Maybe they´d even felt sexual curiosity as little girls and searched exciting proximity?

Freud´s strange skepticism
Freud´s reserve against the abuse stories seems strange today. Family and sexual violence against children and women were, as is well known, criminally inadequately detected, prosecuted insufficiently and sanctioned; Personal testimonies of victims found insufficient attention. Freud seemed to refuse the victims emotional participation and unbiased feedback on the biographical notice of painful experiences.
Stories of suffered violence can be wrongly ignored or found unbelievable. It is also known that whoever has sexual contact with underage or dependent persons is acting irresponsibly and is liable to prosecution, even if the other person behaves encouraging or seductive.
On the other hand, the so-called abuse with the abuse is also well known, the false accusations the invented abuse or violence Biography and false memories that a narrator thinks to be true.

Why did narrators feature themselves as victims?
A listener can unjustified believe in a story or unjustified not believe. He can wrongly be taken in by the persuasiveness of a consistent and coherent presentation and unjustly deny faith in a strange tale. He can put a fitting and coherent presentation due to its smoothness and transparency under suspicion or wrongly understand a struggle for words as sincere representation.
Freud´s skepticism could - we do not know - have been occasionally justified. But then one must ask why certain narrators portrayed fictitious or partly feigned attacks. Freud now understood some abuse stories in a functional perspective. They are subsequently revisions in the sense of psychodynamic compromise formation. Seen in this way sexual attitudes procured presence in the here and now, in the relationship between patient and therapist, but so that the main female character in the story suffers what she does not want; a male antagonist sexually mistreats her and thus experiences moral disqualification. Thus, the described victims’ situation is ambivalent: it should lead to the moral condemnation of the offender and is at the same time a fascinating phenomenon....