In his book, The Assault on Truth, j. M. Masson (I) proposes to challenge the very foundations of psychoanalysis by showing how Freud \u27s abandonment of the so-called seduction theory of the etiology of neurosis was erroneously predicated.
Masson\u27s argument, in essence, may be summarized as follows. Freud, while studying with the eminent neurologist Charcot in Paris (from October 1885 to February 1886), found himself exposed to the prevalent horrors of ch ild abuse, which were copiously detailed in the French medical literature at the time, and which were very probably demonstrated to him at the Paris morgue. The impression of these revelations would contribute profoundly to Freud\u27s formulation of his seduction theory of the etiology of the neuroses in a trio of papers published in 1896
