Reported abuse was actually a fantasy

Freud’s insistence that children have sexual urges seems bizarre today^[1]; the number of possibly abused patients he saw and the potential damage he caused by explaining their stories of abuse as their own childhood fantasies is of enormous concern. This can be seen, namely, in Freud's theory of the Oedipus Complex in which Freud claims that children have "imagined, sexualized [fantasies]" ^[2]about their caretakers. It is still unclear and contested whether or not Freud truly believed that people who claimed to have experienced sexual abuse were actually recounting fantasies or things they made up in their minds. Some believed that Freud denied his original seduction theory merely because of the pressure of his academic and medical peers. The seduction theory was far beyond its time and people were not prepared to face such ideas. But ultimately, he did privately recant this theory and supported the idea that these reported accounts of abuse were not actual abuse, but were fantasies. Sigmund Freud was more comfortable with undermining his female patients by recounting his theory and stating that many of these reports were imagined-- taking the blame and responsibility off of the male abusers.^[3] He played off his patients' sexual abuse instead of reporting it or helping them through the trauma. Due to Freud, many people had their sexual abuse played off as part of their imagination.

[P1] Freud believed most childhood abuse was actually childhood sexual fantasies.