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

by | Vol 19 (3) 2001

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.

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