ly sexual abuse, however, were not generally readily recalled by his patients, but only recalled during the process of psychoanalysis with Freud. Freud hypothesized that their memories of the early trauma, whether sexual abuse or other trauma, had been repressed at the time of the occurrence of the trauma because the child had been unable to process the trauma emotionally.
As a consequence, however, the adult female developed various symptoms of neuroses that represented an acting-out of the unconscious repressed memories. In order for those symptoms to be addressed, according to Freud, the client needed to bring those repressed memories back to consciousness and express the original affect aroused by the traumas. This, then, would allow the client to be healed of his or her symptomatology. Primarily, of course, Freud's clients with hysteria were women, and much of his early work, at least, was based almost exclusively on a female clientele.
Freud explained repressed memories as the storage of the detailed image and affect of a traumatic event which had been placed into the unconscious immediately upon occurrence by a protective ego. According to him, repression was designed to serve the ego by protecting it from the injurious effects of certain events and, later, of certain types of memories which would be damaging to it.
It is important to recognize, of course, that early on Freud repudiated much of his initial theory which held that women had hysterical symptoms because of early sexual abuse. He replaced this idea with his theory that small children fantasized sexual activity with their parents because of their desire for such sexual contact. Nonetheless, he continued to believe in the mechanism of repression of traumatic memories as the linchpin of psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Vol. 12, Vol. 14).
His concept of the unconscious, and of neurosis as representing unconscious contents, was tied together by the conc...