l give a feminist critic of the limitations of both these theories and finally I will explore how feminist understand child sexual abuse and explore some limitations inherent within the theory. I have decided to give a feminist critic on these two models because Freud's psychoanalytical theory is the earliest attempt to explain child sexual abuse and the dysfunctional family model because it is an outgrowth of the psychoanalytic model.
             The earliest proposed explanation for the occurrence of sexual abuse, more specifically incest (although he never called it incest) was Freud's psychoanalytic theory. He developed this theory from his clinical work with female clients who disclosed childhood sexual abuse, often at the hands of their fathers. Initially he believed these women, he was the first to believe that the trauma of child sexual abuse resulted in later psychic damage or what he termed 'hysteria'. He presented his finding in a paper called 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' to his colleagues. After much criticism by his colleagues Freud began to second guess himself and retracted his original theory on the basis that child sexual abuse could not be as common as his patients led him to believe. He began to disbelieve women when they came to him claiming to be sexually abused and proposed that his patients were merely fantasying the sexual relationship with their fathers. Based on this he developed a second theory called infantile fantasy of seduction which included the ideas of the 'Oedipus complex' and 'penis envy'.
             The Oedipus theory holds that little girls initial sees their mother as their love object because of her early care and attention, but once the child sees the penis of another male and "recognizes it as superior counterpart of their own small organ and from that time forward fall victim to envy for the penis"(Freud, 1977, p. 335). As a result of 'penis envy' the child shifts her object...