4 ideas
Sergei Pankejeff, a wealthy young Russian, told Freud about a dream he had just before his fourth birthday. In it, a window opened by itself and he saw six or seven white wolves sitting motionless in a walnut tree, staring at him, and he woke screaming in fear of being eaten. Freud worked from this dream backward and reconstructed a scene the boy had supposedly seen at eighteen months: his parents having sex from behind.
An impression taken in before a child can understand it does little harm when it happens. It turns traumatic later, when sexual maturation or a new event supplies the meaning it lacked. So the damage lies in the later reinterpretation of the earlier event, and cause runs backward through memory.
Freud argues that a primal scene the patient never remembers can still be established by showing that it explains a wide range of symptoms, dream details and associations. Whether it truly happened or was a later fantasy built from glimpses of animals mating matters less, he says, than its working effects on the patient.
When the patient had grown comfortably dependent and resistant, Freud set a fixed end date for the treatment in advance. The approaching deadline gave the patient's defenses a cost, and the material that had been withheld came out quickly. The risk is that the pressure also produces compliance and leaves the work unfinished.