#the fact that i fundamentally don't understand women's experiences and can't even imagine what it's like to be one is kinda the whole point

[lindwurmkai]

I wish I could opt out of posts telling me I am supposedly some kind of Intuitive Misogyny Understander because I "grew up as a girl" or some shit

Like get the fuck out of my house tbh

[septembersghost]

I feel sorry for everything Priscilla has been through especially recently but my thing with her is she mostly trashed Elvis in her book, but now she constantly praises him and refers to him as the love of her life..

Now Priscilla is allowed to have mixed feelings and has a right to speak her truth and I’m not arguing Elvis was perfect, far from it. Being married to him couldn’t have been easy, but her book (which she’s backtracked a few things she’s written about him in it) is a large reason people still trash him to this day 🤷🏻‍♀️

i don't know if she intended it to come across that way, and i feel like people warp it to draw the worst possible conclusions when that was never what she meant. i also wonder a bit if she wrote it...in the wrong frame of my mind, or maybe too soon, or under some outside pressures. because, as you noted, there are things she's circled back around on and reframed. she had a co-author and she was still navigating how to publicly share with people. as a small example, i read this recently: https://www.elvispresley.com.au/priscilla/elvis-and-me-memorializing-elvis-presley.shtml "I feel much more comfortable with crowds, with people and with talking. I just want to clear up so many things that have been altered or perceived differently. I want to put the record straight from my side." this was 2017, but the book was written 32 years sooner. someone and their perspective can vastly change in three decades.

i feel like there were some fundamental differences between them - despite how dearly they loved each other - that they were so unable to breach, that she had trouble understanding for a long time. people make their relationship into this thing that it wasn't, which i imagine was also hard to deal with.

that page says, Priscilla exposes a man of exceptional vastness. he was such an expansive person, and just. the way he was trying so hard to be all things to all people, the way he put that caregiver responsibility on himself (and he definitely did this with priscilla), the way he held this almost idealistic vision of what their life could be, the way he strove to guide and get the best for people even when he did that mistakenly, it all paints this portrait of this vast and unique/unusual soul who kept giving and trying. i can see where she had mixed feelings (regarding the mm or other women or fame and lack of privacy or feeling like he wasn't present for her often enough because he was giving so much to his audiences or the struggle of his addictions and not being able to assuage that and so on). speaking for myself, it feels so easy to empathize with him, but i'd imagine being up close and personal with it, giving your life to it, would make it more difficult to wholly view until later.

people who are looking to trash him aren't going to explore that vastness, they strip him for parts, so they can never possibly understand or lend sympathy to it. i'm not excusing any of the slander that's thrown around at him or how cruelly off-base it is, nor saying either of them were blameless, but i can't fathom that she ever wanted people to weaponize her words or her life with him, and that's probably an additional reason why she's tried to be stalwart in the years since about his impact and furthering his legacy, why she does praise him as a musician and a man, and why she does call him the love of her life (which i don't doubt is true). he had his serious missteps and he had his flaws, and so did/does she, but it doesn't negate that their love was real, nor their fondness for each other even after the divorce, nor how remarkable and often wonderful he was.

i grant her a bit of grace for the fact that she had this whirlwind of a life with such tumultous emotions and then to lose him so suddenly, when they were still dear to one another, when their daughter was still so young, and then to be interrogated over and over again about him, about her lived experience. and of course my heart breaks for her in losing lisa marie, and the current situation happening regarding graceland which would all...just shatter el tbh.

idk i just had a conversation about this a few hours ago with chelsea (and am borrowing thoughts from her!), and so many elements play into what happened between them.

these excerpts are where the quote from earlier came from:

i'll quote what chelsea, who has been a good sounding board for this!, said because it was insightful:

"you have to apply an innocent, nurturing gloss to his relationships and understand that if his significant others felt claustrophobic or smothered, it had mostly to do with the lack of privacy and him seeing himself as the best judge of what was best for them, sometimes wrongly but i think always sincerely trying to be helpful...there's a lot of evidence that he saw her as a little sister at times and treated her very preciously and carefully, even while trying to share his interests and life with her. they tried awfully hard to be what each other wanted and expected and that's the main thing that made them grow apart, i think...also think he was thinking about what kind of person gladys would want him to be with. priscilla reminded him of gladys, reminded him of his promises to her, and made him want to try to settle down and share his heart. he had a fairytale view of changing for someone else, and he learned very late that that wasn't possible and that it was a mistake to impose an ideal of perfect domesticity on him and priscilla, which they both did. because i think it would have been too heavy for him to acknowledge at that time that he might never "have" a normal life, so he felt like he had to kind of force it on himself...elvis wanted to be everything for his friends, but he was so weird and big that he needed more than one person to approximate what he needed back. cilla not really being very spiritual is a big thing where they were just going to have to grow in different directions and find other people."

i think cilla had to spend a significant time untangling her identity from him, and processing everything he was, and i'm sure that she has regrets that anything came across in a darker or more negative way than she meant. loving someone that much and always being a part of them, and they a part of you, and yet growing apart and knowing you cannot make it work no matter how hard you try to create that perfect picture must be so hard and demoralizing in a sense. that heavy heartache of loss and failure. then couple it with grief. i think about what (iirc) kathy westmoreland said about him, which is that the grief is never-ending in a specific way, because he's so much in the world. most of us grieve privately, and of course it never "ends," it changes, but with someone like elvis he's always there and always absent all at once. everyone who loves him - directly as a loved one or indirectly as a fan - pairs that with grief, so we're all experiencing this continual pang of sorrow. i don't necessarily want to hold her difficulty coming to terms with all of that against her (unlike, say, people who really have been out to belittle and besmirch him over the years), when i do believe the true heart of it is love. she said, "Elvis was absolutely the love of my life, and there's no sadness about it because I have my memories, and they're delicious and they're all mine," but you know there's a grief existent in it regardless.

she also said, and i think most importantly: “It’s hurtful, for a man who has given so much, to have others pick him apart. I’ll die defending him and his legacy. Because he deserves it.” i think that's her clearest truth, and the people not willing to hear it are doing her a disservice, and also an incomprehensible one to him. i do worry a lot that eventually this is going to be lost even further, which is where it's like...it falls to us to carry and defend it when we can. because he deserves it.

[pre1ude]

@sunrisemuses , sent 👫 for four headcanons about our muses' relationship (for Molly because.. adorable)

1.

I'm truly just using these hc posts to plot out possible meeting points because I hate introductory scenes, so don't mind me doing it again here lmao. I just think these two are deserving of an unhinged first impression of each other. Absolutely batshit. Just throw all logic out the window. Dean and Danny were so well-plotted, Dean's his 'mission', it all makes perfect narrative sense. I want none of that for Molly and Dan. Let them meet in the middle of breaking into the lab. In the middle of battle. While chasing down the same beast. Snooping around the same place. Using their powers at the same time. Anything, literally anything questionable and legally dubious. I am firmly of the belief that no matter that they never met as kids, they're the exact same manner of fucked up on a fundamental level and their brains just function on some 'i am a human experiment' wavelength that DEMANDS their first interaction be them spiderman pointing at each other. "What the fuck" "No YOU what the fuck!" and nothing less.

2.

Danny would have... a few hangups about experiencing Molly's abilities. Completely unrelated to her as a person and the level of trust he has in her at any time, although initially it's worse because he's his usual brand of cautious of course, that's just a him thing. Specfically though, he's cagey about psychic powers that breach the mind and affect the senses, for the fact alone that having his reality altered is something he could go without experiencing. That said, he does bite the bullet at some point. He'd have probably indulged her with a few of his sound tricks and would have asked what she can do, so he's prepared. Suffice to say, he learns to adore the small, funky washes of psychedelic color and fantasy Molly can paint for him. She's a walking talking acid trip and once he grows comfortable with her power, he also grows a fondness for experiencing the world a little bit brighter. If she'll indulge him, of course. He's not as brave about her time-altering abilities though. Not very keen on suffering that sort of maddening confusion.

3.

Daniel would kill for Molly without question. Listen. Yes, he maintains a certain level of decorum and self-control when it comes to violence at all times, Molly's violence included. Vengeance is one thing, carelessness is another; personal safety comes first. They can't leave a trail of viscera after themselves. However. So much of what they've both gone through is steeped in helplessness, lack of agency and suffering abuse since childhood that at this point achieving safety starts to overwhelmingly overlap with a clean-out revenge. Not until every single wretched creature who's ever participated in that experiment is dead and buried could they ever take a deep breath and stop looking over their shoulder. Daniel understands this. This is where he becomes ruthless, regardless of the circumstances. And no, some of these people he's never met nor been harmed by. But Molly has, and that speaks of their intentions more than enough. This is kinhood at the highest degree, you hurt, I hurt. It's mostly his dogged, ride or die royalty at play here, Molly ends up meaning the world to him, but a small part of it, he hates to admit, is a purely selfish need to get back at men and women like Patricia. To substitute her with another and fulfill a revenge fantasy he could never exact on his very own mother.

4.

This has been on my mind for a while: Them sharing a tiny apartment as roommates is the sitcom dream we deserve. Hear me out. This is purely self indulgent since they have wildly different dispositions, Danny isn't very adventurous for example and I know Molly wants to explore, perhaps even travel, so it may not be a long-term arrangement, but I also can't envision him being able to bear just... parting with her?? So, naturally, imagine, if you will, the two most dysfunctional, superpowered young adults living together in a 10 by 7 one bed, one pullout, with an energetic dog, the creakiest pipes ever and no microwave because Danny put foil in there as first manner of business like the rich, clueless dumbdumb he is. The most disastrous situation you could ever fathom, they can't even boil water between the two of them, money's tight after Daniel disowns his mother (so, makes even more sense to share rent), they manage to start beef with the neighbours two weeks in and get banned from two out of three local convenience stores. Unbridled chaos, I tell you. On the plus side, no need to worry about burglars or thieves. They're a household which consists of essentially the two most dangerous creatures in town, so I'm sure whoever fucks around WILL find out.

1+

Daniel's dog ditches him so goddamn fast every time Molly's around. Don't get Bentley wrong, Dan is his person, his rotten soldier, his sweet cheese, he would wipe the earth clean from the scourge of squirrels for him if he were only allowed to indulge his hubris off-leash, but god, dad is a downright stick in the mud. Strict and no fun. Molly is the opposite. So she gets rewarded with a lap full of hyperactive cocker spaniel and so many slobbery balls dropped at her feet. The love is real. He lays on her shoes every time she's got to go. Lovingly shares all the dirt he's just rolled around in. Engages in sad puppydog eyes warfare whenever she's eating. Just pure, unadulterated, slightly gross love.

[burningtheroots]

Hi, same anon from the long ass ask I sent you. Thank you for responding kindly to my message :) what you said makes a lot of sense and I do agree with many of your points. I do think every movement has its ups and downs.

I suppose (and these are just my personal thoughts!) I feel the way about radical feminism the way I do is because of the way I see a lot of radical feminists talk. I see posts about how all men are inherently evil, how every transwomen is being trans for the sake of preying on women. And inarguably, people like those DO exist, but they are not the majority. Yet when I go through the radfem tag, I see abundant posts like those...so that's why I got the impression that the movement is about degrading these people on a fundamental and individualist base, and not about critiquing patriarchy or misogyny (at least, that the thought behind critiquing misogyny was directly tied to hating all men/invalidating trans people.) I guess, in that way, the way you feel about the trans movement is how I feel about radical feminism, only reversed(?) The ideology itself, if it is as you presented it, sounds understandable. But I've only ever seen radfems who were so hateful to the point I had to imagine it was spurred by trauma, as that is how I acted when I was traumatized, and it made me deeply unhappy with life as I viewed everything negatively. (I acknowledge that these sort of posts probably weren't meant to be about all men or all trans people at times, but when you don't clarify such, it's extremely hard for an outsider to tell.)

Anyway, the point of sending this follow-up is to say thank you for listening and thank you for giving me your view. I can't say I subscribe to either "side" so-to-speak. I want to fight for transgender rights and I want to fight for female sex rights. I want to fight against bigotry towards trans people and I want to fight against misogyny/patriarchy, and I believe both these things can co-exist. Not saying you don't believe so either! Maybe you do or don't, I'm just giving my own perspective. I admit I'm obviously not all-knowledgeable, so even I don't know what the best course of action is to ensure everybody has proper rights and visibility. But I keep learning, I just want everyone to be happy & to be them & to not be harmed for it by the law or society. It seems unrealistic now and we have to fight for that sort of thing, but I'm going to try my best to hear everyone out and support everyone the best I can. I just want everyone to have a right to their own body, identity, and protections of their sex and identity.

I hope you have a good day!

Hey!! I planned to reply earlier this time but turns out I didn’t. xD

I can‘t judge your personal experiences, I haven’t seen the posts you‘re describing, or I interpret them differently than you do. Which is fine.

As for the transgender aspect, I don’t think that someone is inherently predatory for being trans — in fact, I acknowledge dysphoria as the serious mental health condition it is. Being a gender critical radfem, however, means that I/we believe that no man, regardless of his "gender" identity, should get access to spaces and categories (e.g. in sports or at award shows) which are reserved for women, and on the basis of their sex & the discrimination and violence they face due to their sex. Our "identity" isn‘t a set of feelings, it‘s an objective, biological reality, and we shouldn’t have to include members of our oppressor class in it.

I think you can present yourself however you like without saying that it makes you a woman when you‘re not, and without reinforcing feminine stereotypes. Just be yourself and call it individuality.

Of course, men who don’t conform to patriarchy gender roles are at risk of being violated by other men, which is why I think there should be a third option (bathrooms, sports etc.) if need be — they still don’t get to enter women‘s spaces though.

As for men as such, my empathy is pretty low. Not every single man on earth is a predator, but almost all of them are complicit in misogyny, and every single one benefits from it. For example, the VAST majority of men consumes pornography, and the rest is at least complicit for the most part, which says a lot about the average man. If the majority of men wasn’t part of the problem, the world would look a lot differently — I have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to misogynistic men, even if it‘s only 0.0001%.

Most of them are like "if they‘re nice to me, it‘s okay", "if I don’t actively participate, it‘s not my problem" or "yeah it‘s bad but they‘re my family/friends". It‘s on men to hold each other accountable and fight tooth & nail when misogyny pops up even when it‘s inconvenient for them personally. I can’t force them to do that, but I can judge them when they don‘t.

I want equality, but above all, I want women & girls to be fully liberated and men to be unable to hurt women & girls ever again. They can be allies, or they can be enemies. No inbetween.

Anyways, thanks for your message. :)

[thelittlepalmtree]

I think one of the things I hate about the abortion conversation is That it is so clear that the pro life people do not understand the female experience at all. Like I am a lesbian asexual who asexual who does not go outside I am in no danger of an unwanted pregnancy barring barring something really traumatic happening to me. I also happened to live in a blue state. I also happen to know many people who have been pregnant and work in education so I know a lot about writing children I know a lot of people who have kids. I'm with kids all day teenagers arguably the worst kids. And pregnancy has always been AA huge part of my life. The concept of pregnancy the idea of it coming into my life I have honestly thought about pregnancy and what part it might play in my life and the lives of everyone I knew since I was a child.

To have a body capable of becoming pregnant is a unique experience to a certain sect of humanity. And if you find out later in life that your body is not capable of being pregnant or if you make choices that take that capability away Or if something happens it still doesn't change the fact that if you are someone who is asigned female at birth you are very likely to spend a lot of your time thinking about pregnancy. That is going to be your experience. And it's kind of a common trope for women who are going through their 1st pregnancy to say nobody tells you. Nobody tells you that you're going to grow hair and weird places. Nobody tells you that you're going to be exhausted all the time. Nobody tells you you are going to get more pimples. Because for each woman pregnancy is a unique experience and so there are inevitably going to be surprises. But that being said somebody is gonna tell you and it's the pregnant woman herself. Everyone that I have known during pregnancy has talked to me about the experience of pregnancy so much that while I don't think I know what it is I definitely know that I don't want it.

Every mother I've ever talked to every time we ever talk about pregnancy there's a ton of people who make online content specifically about pregnancy, Like the experience of pregnancy is often very difficult for most people. My best friend had what would mostly be considered a great pregnancy and still had a really rough time. And of course for some people that process is worth it. Just like for some people donating an organ or Going to medical school or volunteering your time at a soup kitchen is a process worth their effort. But you wouldn't force someone to do any of those things which in some cases Are a far smaller struggle than pregnancy and having a child.

I feel like pregnancy is always discussed as a minor in convenience. But it truly isn't. It is a major burden on your life and I can't even find the words to describe it. Is the idea that I would be forced to have a pregnancy against my will as someone who has chone who has chosen not to get pregnant is probably like the worst thing I can think of happening to me. Is the absolute violation of my body Being forced to have a pregnancy is just impossible for me to think of. It's also really hard for me to describe but I feel like most people who have been assigned female at birth understand this concept. And if you happen to be a transman who's capable of being pregnant I can't even imagine the level of trauma it would be to be forced to carry a pregnancy.

And the lack of empathy for that huge violation whole is huge violation horrible violation of a person's body is so awful to me. Like I can debate someone about anything but this is really hard for me to debate because I just always feel like the person I'm talking to does not understand what they are saying. There is a fundamental thing that I understand because of my experience that I cannot communicate to someone else that just ends up falling flat between us.

[ceilidhtransing]

Kinda astounding how much of the pushback against trans people existing and doing what we like with our bodies seems to come from cis people projecting their feelings onto us and being seemingly incapable of comprehending the fact that we truly are different from them.

Like, a cis straight man can't possibly imagine wanting to "dress up as" / "become" a woman and he despises even the notion, so he holds trans women in contempt - never mind the fact that cis men and trans women are two different groups, and the fact that cis men don't want to live as women has precisely no bearing on the validity of trans women.

Or, more pertinently to my experience, the way in which so much of the attempt to restrict the bodily autonomy of transmasc people seems to come from cis women projecting their feelings onto us and assuming that we - cis women and transmasc people - are fundamentally the same. They can't imagine wanting the effects of testosterone, or wanting top surgery, and they know that they would regret it if they pursued these things, and they assume we would feel the same way and thus need to be "protected" from "making the wrong choice" and "ruining our bodies" by "doing something we'd regret". Never mind the fact that transmasc people are not cis women, so whether or not cis women would make the same choices as us matters not one bit. (This is also why attempts by some cis women to tell us they "totally understand how we feel" get under my skin - they don't, and the assumption that cis women and transmasc people are basically the same is a dangerous one.)

The more I think about it the more it also occurs to me that so much of the "grooming" discourse is probably similarly rooted in a total failure to understand that cis people and trans people are two different groups, and you can't "turn someone trans" just as you can't make a trans person cis.

Truly I can't imagine being so unable to conceive of a group of people as being different from me, and needing different things and wanting different things from life; and so unable to realise that my feelings are not necessarily their feelings; but it's an inability that seems to cause so much damage in the world. Obviously it's hardly the sole cause of all transphobia - transphobia is a many-headed beast - but it's a driving force behind a lot of it.

[vavuska]

This girl is right: Freud's mom was a hottie!

Sigmund Freud (aged 16) and his mother, Amalia, in 1872

More about Oedipus complex:

Who were Freud's parents?

Freud was born to Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic), the first of eight children. Both of his parents were from Galicia, a historic province straddling modern-day West Ukraine and southeast Poland. His father, Jakob Freud (1815–1896), a wool merchant, had two sons, Emanuel (1833–1914) and Philipp (1836–1911), by his first marriage. Jakob's family were Hasidic Jews and, although Jakob himself had moved away from the tradition, he came to be known for his Torah study. He and Freud's mother, Amalia Nathansohn, who was 20 years younger and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer on 29 July 1855. They were struggling financially and living in a rented room, in a locksmith's house at Schlossergasse 117 when their son Sigmund was born. He was born with a caul, which his mother saw as a positive omen for the boy's future.

In 1859, the Freud family left Freiberg.

Jakob Freud took his wife and two children (Freud's sister, Anna, was born in 1858; a brother, Julius born in 1857, had died in infancy) firstly to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna where four sisters and a brother were born: Rosa (b. 1860), Marie (b. 1861), Adolfine (b. 1862), Paula (b. 1864), Alexander (b. 1866).

How was Freud's relationship with his parents?

The answer to this question could be found in the letters from Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin nose and throat doctor with whom Freud carried on a passionate 15-year friendship. The letters suggested a greater anguish by Freud over the abandonment of the seduction theory and several details about his auto-analysis.

Mothers and Nannies

Amalia was considered by her grandchildren to be an intelligent, strong-willed, quick-tempered but egotistical personality. She has been described as lively and humorous, with a strong attachment to her eldest son whom she called "mein goldener Sigi".

Just as Amalia idolised her eldest son, so there is evidence that the latter in turn idealised his mother, whose domineering hold over his life he never fully analysed.

However, nannies or nurses were always present in the Viennese's bourgeois households. The Freud-Fliess letters attracted attention to Freud's nanny and also to the role played by nannies in the ideal family of psychoanalytic theory. Included in the models that explained the bourgeois family since the nineteenth century, but excluded by analytic theory, the nanny, ever present in Austrian upper-class families, still poses a question to the father-mother-infant triangle. The relevance of the nanny's presence in children's development is fundamental and could introduce themes such as adultery, sexual harassment by the master, illegitimate children.

Freud's interest in nannies began, it seems, with the analysis of the cases that would be known in the analytical literature as those that were in the origin of the 'seduction theory' – and also with his auto-analysis. His interest, though, extended well beyond the time of this emergence, as we will see.

Almost all of his patients had a nanny or nurse – some of them had two, what would lead to a curious unfolding of this character, either in the duo good mother/ bad nanny, or, in a kind of duplication, as good nanny/bad nanny.

Freud's nanny, from whom even the name is disputed, could have been a Czech woman, a catholic, who took him to masses and reproved him for being good for nothing. He wrote:

"Today's dream has, under the strongest disguise, produced the following: she was my teacher in sexual matters and complained because I was clumsy and unable to do anything."

In the next letter (October, 15), Freud registers what his mother had told him about the nanny. Asking her if she remembered the nanny, he got the answer:

"Of course", she said, "an elderly person, very clever, she was always carrying you off to some church; when you returned home you preached and told us all about God Almighty. During my confinement with Anna (two and a half years younger) it was discovered that she was a thief, and all the shiny new kreuzers and zehners [coins] and all the toys that had been given to you were found in her possession. Your brother Philipp himself fetched the policeman; she then was given ten months in prison."

Telling that his nanny made him steal money to give her, Freud interpreted his dream as a reproach for asking money from his patients for his bad treatment of them, in the same way as "the old woman got money from me for her bad treatment." The fact that Freud used his mother's remembrance to strengthen the interpretation he made of the dream –in which he was the thief - doesn't matter here, neither his identification with the nanny, observed by some analysts of this famous dream ("I = She"), but it is relevant to consider that it seems that it was with his auto-analysis that the nanny figure began to be seen as a malignant one or, in the best hypothesis, as an ambiguous one.

What needs explanation is how the theory of the Oedipus complex accounts for the boy's guilty impulses toward his mother but ignores the boy's arousal at the hands of his nurse, especially in view of how much more attention his nurse gets from Freud than his mother does.

Discussing the possible interpretations of Freud's dreams along his auto-analysis, many authors saw the relevance of the nanny's presence in his development until his conclusion that "the remarkable circumstance" is that Freud, in effect, had two mothers, his actual mother – whose nakedness he can only mention in Latin – and his nanny whom he remembers in association with numerous disturbing sexual experiences. Having two such mothers, and the luck of having the 'bad' ugly mother banished from his life when he was only two and a half, allows Freud to maintain a secure split between the internalized good and bad mothers.

Unconsciously, Freud's nurse was his seductress and shamer, his mother the pure object of guilty desire.

Thus Freud's discovery of the Oedipus complex emerges not only from memories of a small boy's guilty, aggressive lust for his mother, but from memories of dependence on her, too – a dependence remembered, however as the seduction of a small bourgeois, Austrian boy by a Czech working-class woman in a province of the Austrian Empire still recovering from the Revolution of 1848.

Freud's father

To begin with the so-called 'seduction theory': in 1896 Freud published a polemic article in which he attributed the origin of hysteria to a sexual trauma suffered by his female – and some male - patients that ranged from sexual harassment to sexual abuse in the hands of a member of the family: uncles (some of whom were revealed as fathers in subsequent publications), brothers, guardians, school colleagues, or nannies. He said that this trauma was "unhappily" caused "too frequently, by a near kin."

In this article he said that in 18 cases of hysteria until then analyzed by him (six men and twelve women), all of them showed this etiology, or cause, of the condition.

By 1897, Freud was spending six days a week analyzing his patients, many of them suffering from hysteria. Increasingly, their problems resonated with his own. Freud began to suspect that he too was neurotic, suffering from what he described as "a little case hysteria." He became consumed by his own self-analysis.

In the spring of 1897, Freud wrote his friend Fliess about a new patient, a young woman with hysterical symptoms: "It turned out that her supposedly otherwise noble and respectable father regularly took her to bed when she was eight to twelve years old and misused her…"

It was Freud wrote, "fresh confirmation" that the prime cause of hysteria was the sexual abuse of an innocent child by an adult, most often, a father. But his theory had alarming implications. If he himself suffered from a form of hysteria, and if an abusive father caused hysteria, then Freud was forced to draw a distressing conclusion. He began to imagine that his own father might have abused him. Three months after Jacob's death, he wrote Fliess: "Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts, and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother… and those of several younger sisters."

Freud realized that he can not get further in understanding others unless he analyzes himself. That was another one of those great ideas. [But] The dreams that he analyzed are not really particularly well analyzed.

Freud interpreted the message "close the eyes" in his dream after his father's death to mean that there was something he was not meant to see, nor to know about, his father. To make his theory work, his father's secret had to be that he had sexually abused his children. But, when he could find no evidence of such behavior and no clear memory of abuse among his brothers and sisters, his seduction theory collapsed.

By the next year, he began doubting his proposition, and wrote to Fliess: "I don't believe in my neurotica [neurosis theory] any more." Even if he mentioned the seduction theory in other letters of this year (and also years after), he began, then, to treat these denounces of his patients as a fantasy.