'The expectation of eternal fame was so beautiful, as was that of certain wealth, complete independence, travels and lifting the children above the severe worries that robbed me of my youth,' he recalled.
Instead, he was publicly humiliated.
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| by Doug Savage |
The meeting was chaired by none other than Krafft-Ebing, who had documented cases of actual child abuse—and even come up with the name for the perversion: pedophilia.
The best he could say about the junior lecturer's thesis was: 'It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.'
Unable to accept his own failure, Freud told himself that he was a prophet ahead of his time and set about transforming his 'fairy tale' into a seductive fantasy.
Instead of claiming that his patients had suffered abuse as kids, he decided that all children fantasized about having sex with their parents.
He based this highly dubious 'universal truth' not on any truly empirical scientific research but on his pseudo-mystical ability to interpret dreams.
And it's his exploration of the Unconscious that Freud's apologists like to emphasize nowadays.
However, leaving aside the current doubts in neuroscience about whether such a thing even exists, Freud certainly wasn't the first to realize that people often acted without really understanding why.
As a (Christian) philosopher, Blaise Pascal, had put it two centuries earlier: 'The heart has its reasons of which reason knows not.'
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