What needs to be really questioned is the way Freud imposed his theory onto his patients. As we saw earlier, Charcot gave strong suggestions to his patients about how they should present their symptoms based on his own theory. Freud might have followed Charcot’s style of relating to the patients in an authoritarian and imposing manner.
Freud’s way of convincing the patient reminds us of the “Ashikaga Incident” in Japan. Toshikazu Sugaya was convicted of murder in 1993, imprisoned, and acquitted in 2010 due to renewed DNA evidence favorable for Sugaya. He is believed to be wrongfully convicted as he was coerced to make a false confession that he committed the crime. In a similar way, Freud’s patients might have acknowledged that she was the victim of sexual seduction. (I repeat Freud’s words here. “Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them [patients] to embark on a reproduction of them [sexual trauma]”(Freud, ibid.). This also exemplifies the way dissociative patients respond to others’ suggestions. They are very susceptible to them, and easily reproduce what they feel they are expected. Freud’s approach was not a treatment, but unnecessary suggestion that current therapists are strongly advised not to do in the treatment of dissociative patients.
After he wrote “the Aetiology of Hysteria”, Freud suddenly changed his view in the fall 1897. His sexual seduction theory was now abandoned as he realized that the patients’ sexual seduction only existed in their fantasy. Retrospectively, Freud’s drastic swing of the view resulted in giving him serious limitations to the search for the real etiology of hysteria.
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