Truth Opened

Freud presented a paper in April, 1896 to the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna on the sexual abuse of his female patients by their fathers as the etiology of hysteria. Patients had told these stories to psychiatrists before, but Freud was the first psychiatrist who believed that his patients were telling the truth.

Freud hoped his paper would disturb “the sleep of the world.” However, according to Freud, his paper was “met with an icy reception from the asses.”

One of his colleagues reacted, “It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.”

Freud wrote to a friend saying, "They can all go to hell."

Initially, Freud felt that it was important for him to risk his reputation and ridicule in order to present his findings. After all, Freud's patients had shown courage in his office by confronting the pain of what happened to them in childhood.

Less than two weeks after he gave the paper, he wrote to a friend saying: "I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me."

Unfortunately, Freud later dismissed his patients’ disclosures as the fantasies of hysterical women who invented stories. The women betrayed again.

He said patients had been deceiving themselves and him: “. . . I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.”

In 1905, Freud publicly retracted his theory that hysteria in women was caused by early childhood sexual abuse. Instead, Freud developed a victim-blaming story, a myth, to explain away the trauma - he termed it the "feminine Oedipal Complex," later referred to as the Electra complex - that girls completed with their mothers for their fathers affection.

Now, over a hundred years later, we know the truth.
Truth is the beginning of all discovery and recovery.


For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Luke 8:17. 

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. John 8:32