April 21, 1896: The Aetiology Of Hysteria is published by Sigmund Freud.

Yes, it was published in German originally. As will be seen from the English text, the actual date of his address to the Verein für Psychiatrie und Neurologie isn’t 100% certain, but I’m going with April 21.

Although the reader may find this paper heavy going, even irrelevant, it is, in my humble opinion, incredibly important when it comes to false rape allegations of any historicity. If you don’t want to or can’t read it all, jump to page 203:

“I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades.”

The bottom line is that Freud believed women who were not right in the head were that way because they had been sexually abused when they were very young. This view, that young girls are frequently sexually abused, usually by their fathers, boys slightly less so, is one of the disgusting pillars of feminist theory.

The truth is very different. I covered this in my live hangout of September 5, 2019:

https://archive.org/details/false-rape-timeline-we-believe-the-children

but briefly, childhood amnesia and confabulation account for the vast majority of these experiences.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson suggested Freud abandoned his so-called seduction theory under peer pressure. Masson is a crank who was once engaged to Catharine MacKinnon.

It should be noted that this idea goes way beyond early childhood. When there is a rape in a TV soap opera or a documentary about child sexual abuse, rape crisis centres are deluged with phone calls from women who have been triggered to remember a sexual assault from years or decades previously. The women who work for these centres never tell the callers the truth, and not infrequently such allegations lead to police reports, even court cases, sometimes with tragic consequences. And this is before we even begin talking about therapists implanting false memories in the minds of already troubled women.