Starting from two sensational episodes of infanticide that filled the Viennese fin de siècle press, it is discussed Freud’s public and private silence about those facts in the light of his recent abandonment of the seduction theory and his first formulation of the Oedipus complex. It is argued that Freud’s silence was a strategic decision in order to avoid his new Oedipal theory being brought into disrepute by those events that seemed to disprove it. Moreover, at the time he couldn’t have anything to say about those tragic events, since only in the last few years, in his theory, he faced the issue of parent-child relationship and particularly the mother-child relationship, driven by the substantial entry into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society of many of his female students who enhanced the role of the mother and of the pre-Oedipal relationship.
Keywords: History of psychoanalysis; Seduction theory; Infanticide; Trauma; Mothers and nursemaids