The Assault On Truth

Plot

In 1895, Freud stated that emotional disturbances in adult life stem from actual traumatic experiences in childhood, the memory of which has been repressed. But later, he renounced this theory, arguing instead that his women patients had "fantasized" their early memories of rape and seduction-- a view on which the budding science of psychoanalysis would be based. As a result, most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have continually distrusted their patients'- especially women patients'- accounts of early traumatic experiences, and, like Freud, have treated such traumas as fantasy rather than reality.