Dead Wild Roses

Ever find a spot where you could pinpoint where something went wrong and broke-shit on such a massive scale that the damage is still being undone? See Freud on incest…

“THERAPISTS AND EVALUATORS
We need to take a large step back in time for a
moment, to the early part of Freud’s era, when
modern psychology was born. In the 1890s, when
Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck
by how many of his female patients were revealing
childhood incest victimization to him. Freud
concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the
major causes of emotional disturbances in adult
women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper

called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However,
rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues
for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with
scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of
excellent reputation (most of his patients came
from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of
incest.
Within a few years, Freud buckled under this
heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In
their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,”
which became the foundation of modern
psychology. According to this theory any young
girl actually desires sexual contact with her father,
because she wants to compete with her mother to
be the most special person in his life. Freud used
this construct to conclude that the episodes of
incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him
had never taken place; they were simply fantasies
of events the women had wished for when they
were children and that the women had come to
believe were real. This construct started a
hundred-year history in the mental health field of
blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them
and outright discrediting of women’s and
children’s reports of mistreatment by men.
Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage
was set for some psychologists to take the view
that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors
that couldn’t be denied—because they were
simply too obvious—should be considered
mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus
full of descriptions of young children who
“seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of
women whose “provocative” behavior causes men
to become violent or sexually assaultive toward
them.
I wish I could say that these theories have long
since lost their influence, but I can’t.”

-Lundy Bancroft.  Why Does He Do That? p. 684 (of 1020)