Was Sigmund Freud A Paedophile?

[Anonymous]

I recently read somewhere (unfortunately cannot find the link) that Sigmund Freud's lifelong dream was apparently to have sex with an 8 yr old girl.

Is this true?

 

[Anonymous]

I'm guessing this is from some new and outragous biography. It is always so easy to earn money on making accusations about famous people who are dead.

 

[Anonymous]

There is some evidence that Freud may well have mis-diagonsed child patients as suffering from hysteria, when they were actually victims of sexual abuse. But there is no evidence that Freud himself was ever involved himself.
Sounds like one of the Nazi slurs used to denounce psychology as a 'Jewish science'.

 

[JamesWhitehead]

I have not read any accusations of this kind directed at the
old fraud but his cocaine addiction is well documented and his
sexuality has been queried with regard to his intense relationship
with Fliess.

However, Ernest Jones, his English disciple and translator was
a struck-off Doctor and his offences related to children. I cannot
now recall whether girls or boys were his victims.

 

[intaglio]

I seem to recall that Freud originally assumed that his patients stories of abuse were true. This was derided by his contemporaries and so he recast his ideas to make the stories he was hearing into fantasies based upon repressed sexuality.

 

[Anonymous]

Be that as it may, Freud was not exactly the most balanced individual. He may not have been a paedophile, but he apparently wrote somewhere that he had sexual fantasies about him mother after bathing in water she had during her menstral period...