Yes. 👍 Check this out, and please read Laplanche on this subject, too. ALSO: please read Freud. Jeffrey Masson’s conclusions from his findings have been infinitely repeated by all the many people who have never read or studied Freud. Many have been relieved to have any good excuse not to have to study Freud. This one has been so useful for all of the many people who want to believe, very badly, that Freud was a Bad Man. So many people have been eager to cancel him, retroactively. Or, at the very least, to say that “although Freud got some things right, he got many more things wrong” — which they know, because they are smarter and better than Freud. Psychology teachers and therapists love that one. We love to convey, “I am smarter and better than Freud.” So if we can accuse him of something terrible? Great news for us! It’s too bad that what too many believe — that Freud denied all women’s stories of their childhood sexual abuse, particularly those that implicated their own fathers, for political and patriarchal reasons — is untrue. At first, Freud argued with his women patients, who insisted that they had NOT been sexually abused by their fathers, that actually, they must have been. At the time, he believed that women with hysterical symptoms must be repressing a specific thing: sexual abuse from their fathers. But he finally accepted that hysterical symptoms could occur even in women who had never, as children, been sexually abused by their fathers. He had to accept that not all hysterics are repressing a literal scene of incest, or are childhood sexual abuse victims. Why? Because some of his patients were telling him that they had NOT been sexually abused. He listened to them, as he did for the patients who said otherwise. He ceased trying to convince women who had never been sexually abused that they must have been, but they had just repressed it all. That remains a very important lesson for therapists and patients alike to learn! We should thank him for having had this shift in his thinking — as his understanding of the unconscious became more sophisticated over the course of his professional life. We should not underestimate the power of the unconscious. Freud had to stop believing that if someone has a certain symptom or set of symptoms, then invariably, that person must have suffered from childhood sexual abuse. Why? Because, to put it bluntly, more people have hysterical symptoms than not. So no, it does not have to be that literal. So yes, we can still develop our various neurotic symptoms, even severe symptoms, without having been abused. We can now understand that one’s development of sexuality is itself inherently traumatic. Psychosexual development will leave its mark on everyone. Patients can suffer because of many reasons, and from the many childhood experiences they endure — including sexual abuse for some, but not ONLY because of that. How a patient’s symptoms manifest from their own unconscious is individual to the patient. So, QUESTION: what can we conclude, with absolute certainty, MUST be true about a patient’s past experiences, if they present with a specific symptom, or specific set of symptoms? ANSWER: Nothing. We can conclude nothing from that. Every patient is unique — with their own lives, their own unconscious, and their own symptoms. If we are certain that we can know MORE about what the patient has experienced than what the patient has said, then we are making a serious mistake. As Lacan later explained, the patient’s transference to the analyst may be that the analyst is the “subject supposed to know,” but we do NOT “know,” and cannot “know.” Freud came to understand this well over a century ago. We are still waiting for the rest of the world to join him.