When we think of Freud, our first thoughts might well center on psychoanalysis or Austria, his flight from the Gasse in Vienna and the Nazi regime to London. His extraordinary rooms near Hampstead Heath, thick Persian rugs, quilt covered sofas, figurines and statues from Bali, Egypt, Peru, every continent. The garden in Hampstead where he sat sheltered in an English landscape.

At first glance it is possible to think that there could not possibly be any connection between Freud and Afro-American women. But upon closer examination of Freud’s life and work, it becomes clear that this is not the case.

Freud’s Studies in France

In 1855 Freud was twenty-nine years old and nearing the end of his medical training in Austria. At this point he undertook a study trip to Paris to work under Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893), an eminent neurologist at that time. Freud was certainly a great admirer of Charcot. And Charcot practied hypnosis, and treated hysterical patients at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris.

For the first time in Paris, Freud had access to the body of French literature on child sexual abuse. French authors were the first to write on this subject, and in 1860 ‘A Medico-legal Study of Cruelty and Brutal Treatment Inflicted on Children’ by Ambroise Auguste Tardieu (1818-1879) appeared in the professional journal, Annales d’hygiene publique et de medicine legale. Tardieu was a professor of legal medicine at the University of Paris as well as dean of the Faculty of Medicine and president of the Academy of Medicine (Masson 1984). According to the Dictionnaire encyclopedique des sciences medicales (3rd ser., 15, 1885) he was ‘the most eminent representative of French medicine of the time.’ Tardieu’s article focussed on thirty-two cases of cruelty to children, which he described in forensic detail, as a ‘legal physician working under the directions of a court of law’ (Masson 1984).

In twenty-one cases, the majority, the perpetrators were the parents themselves. The children were often very young, and the crimes often resulted in death. In 1878 Tardieu went on to cite rape statistics for France for the period 1858-1869 in A Medico-Legal Study of Assaults on Decency (1878). Out of 11,576 accusations of rape or attempted rape, 79 percent (9,125) were directed against children (Masson 1984).

Freud’s Attendance at Post-Mortems

Freud’s studies in Paris lasted from 3 October 1885 to 28 February 1886, and in his preface to Captin John Gregory Bourke’s Scatalogical Rites of All Nations, Freud wrote:

While I was living in Paris in 1885 as a pupil of Charcot, what chiefly attracted me, apart from the the great man’s own lectures, were the demonstrations and addresses given by Brouardel. He used to show us from post-mortem material at the morgue how much there was which deserved to be known by doctors but of which science preferred to take no notice.

Freud had met Professor Brouardel at Charcot’s home and went on to attend his course of lectures and post-mortems at the Paris morgue. Some of Brouardel’s post-mortems were on child victims of abuse. As Masson points out in Assault on Truth (1984), it is highly likely that Freud attended at least one of these (Masson 1984).

Freud’s study trip to Paris thus predisposed him to take seriously the retrieved memories of his hysterical patients in Vienna. After working extensively with hysterical patients, including the famous Anna O., a pseudonym for Dora Pappenheim who translated A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Freud presented his paper on The Aetiology of Hysteria on 21 April 1986 before the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna.

‘Gentlemen,’ he began, and then proceeded to tell a room full of the Austrian equivalent of Victorian gentlemen that of eighteen studies of hysterical patients, he had traced the commencement of symptoms back to Missbrauch prior to the age of eight. Freud used the German term ‘misuse’ or ‘abuse’, and not seduction (see Bruno Bettelheim). He then went on to inform this room full of Viennese Victorians that one of the findings that perplexed him the most was the fact that he had found hysteria and the Missbrauch aetiology as common among the educated middle classes as among the poor and uneducated. When Freud stopped reading, silence filled the room like thunder.

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