Select Page

There’s more than the Real. The so-called Abandonment of the Seduction Theory and the Incest Recovery Movement

The recognition of the prevalence of incest and sexual abuse, coincides with a new focus on the seduction theory. The person and the work of Freud are vehemently attacked, first and above all by the Incest Recovery Movement. As a rule, their criticisms are embedded in a purely political discourse and consist, for the better part, of personal attacks on Freud. They also fail to recognise the revolutionary character of his discovery: the importance of fantasy in psychic reality, and the phantasmal nature of the working?through of traumatic events. Every notion of fantasy and unconscious conflict is vehemently rejected. The subject is left with no possibility to act and to question his own subjective implication. Here one can only oppose this with the psychoanalytic ethic, which stresses the dimension of speaking well.

Hysteria’s doing well, in fact she has never had it so good: Reflections starting from Showalter’s Hystories

This is a review of Elaine Showalter’s book concerning the modern appearance of hysteria. We focused mainly on the Incest Recovery Movement and Multiple Personality Disorder, the new way for the hysteric to give shape to the impossible sexual relation. What can properly be defined as the forclusion of the subject and desire in modern trauma therapy, leaves only the option of the Real and its psychotic effects open to the patient.