The Freudian Coverup

The Freudian Coverup is a theory introduced by social worker Florence Rush in 1971, which asserts that Sigmund Freud intentionally ignored evidence that his patients were victims of sexual abuse. The theory argues that in developing his theory of infant sexuality, he misinterpreted his patients' claims of sexual abuse as symptoms of repressed incestuous desires. Therefore, Freud claimed that children who reported sexual abuse by adults had either imagined or fantasized the experience.

Rush introduced The Freudian Coverup in her presentation The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View, about childhood sexual abuse and incest, at the April 1971 New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) Rape Conference.

The theory (though under a different name) was given further promotion in 1984 through the publishing of the book The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. He believed he independently came to the same conclusion as Rush through his review of the materials in the Freud Archives.