Kicking the Shins of the Giant

...Furthermore, if Masson were right the problem of hysteria would be greater than ever, for the incidence of child abuse has reportedly increased since the turn of the century...

...In other instances, the opposites of Masson's conclusions would be the more plausible...

...The Assault on Truth does have one virtue...

...At the end of this self-praising book he grandiosely declares: " I was challenged not on the basis of my evidence, but because I had revealed this evidence...

...Masson's account of the unfortunate nose operation Wilhelm Fliess performed on Freud's patient Emma Eckstein is another instance of non sequitur reasoning...

...But the fact that there are external demons—which Freud never denied— does not mean there are no internal ones...

...While professing to thank his guileless hosts, Eissler and Anna Freud— even angels are fooled by appearances, Milton pointed out—Masson leaves behind a dead rat on their plates (to use Evtushenko's image...

...Recalling "the pinches and pats of [her] father, grandfather and other male relatives, gestures never bestowed in the same way on [her] brother," Louise Bernikow Among Women writes: "Freud's patients might well have been reporting the emotional content of something that happened and happened frequently—not rape, but sexual aggression...

...In the Eckstein case, the situation is complicated by our having only Freud's letters to Fliess...

...Instead, he argues for a suspiciously high incidence of rape and incest, a belief currently popular in some feminist circles...

...To be sure, there are aspects of Freud's seduction theory that deserve reconsideration...

...Fortunately, his appendix contains Freud's readily accessible "Aetiology of Hysteria," the paper setting forth the theory in its original form...

...Masson might have considered that provocative possibility...

...He may even refer to menstruation...

...How much easier life would be if Masson were right: We could lock up the batterers and molesters and rest easy...

...Yet hysteria, in Freud's sense of hysterical blindness and paralysis, has virtually disappeared...

...Never mind that these books have at best a tangential relation to Freud's seduction theory...

...For example, he quotes Freud's well-known 1897 letter to Fliess expressing concern that the seduction theory is based on insufficient evidence...

...Yes, Virginia, there is an unconscious...

...Perhaps even psychoanalysis has paid insufficient attention to the unconscious seductive stratagems of adults on children and indeed on other adults, a limitation of some significance in the very example before us...

...Now I can once again remain quiet and modest...

...The borderline patient, rather than the neurotic, is the central challenge of psychoanalysis today: not the sexually repressed but the sexually promiscuous, fragmented personality incapable of relating to another person in any meaningful way...

...He draws upon unpublished as well as published letters, ignoring that letters cannot be used as proof the way a formal paper might be: Because their writers share a private context, references are often unclear, antecedents are missing...

...Mas-son insists that literal violence or abuse was the culprit, and contends that psychoanalysis would have developed differently had Freud not suppressed the "truth...

...This does not restrain Masson, who concludes that Freud developed the idea of hysterical bleeding and, consequently, that of seduction as fantasy, to protect his friend from the charge of incompetence (Fliess had left a piece of gauze in Eckstein's nose, causing her initial hemorrhage...

...The great, it seems, cannot be allowed the privacy the rest of us cherish...

...But the word "bleeding" admits of different interpretations here...

...The strongest passage in support of Masson's view occurs in a letter from Freud to Fliess already published by Max Schur: "First of all, Eckstein...

...From the very title on its screaming red cover to the full-page photograph of the writer on the back, it is less an examination of Freud's supposed "assault on truth" than an assault on both Freud and the reader...

...Yet like Humpty Dumpty, Masson could say of his quotations, "When I use a word...

...Freud subsequently concluded that his hysterical patients were largely victims of fantasy...

...A former professor of Sanskrit and a trained analyst, although scarcely a practicing one, Masson was for dubious reasons (described at length by Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker) hand-picked to be Project Director of the Freud Archives—and then fired...

...Where Freud is subtle, Masson is crude...

...Should feminists accept Masson—who has sounded as if he were about to burst forth in Don Giovanni's catalogue song in his interviews—as a spokesperson, that would be almost as ironic as Kurt Eissler's making him keeper of the Archives...

...it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less...

...These are hardly the words of a man who had compromised to please his colleagues, or who had suffered a "personal failure of courage...

...One wonders why Masson ever decided to be an analyst, so tone deaf is he to psychological themes (he called fantasies "lies...

...As one of my psychiatrist friends put it, "You want to strike back...

...Yet if we think of seduction in the sense of titillation short of intercourse, then the seduction theory is alive and well in the work of Freud himself, as a cursory glance at his "Case of Dora" with its steaming family and extra-family entanglements reveals...

...Reviewed by Elaine Hoffman Baruch Associate Professor of English, York College, CUNY "There is always something she prefers to the truth," wrote Samuel Johnson about Clarissa, the heroine of his 18th-century contemporary Samuel Richardson...

...Nevertheless, Masson boldly asserts that the letter "symbolizes the beginning of an internal reconciliation with his colleagues," forgetting that Freud's Victorian audience would have been more comfortable with his notion of adults seducing children than with his later one of children fantasizing seduction...

...At least that is what he thinks...

...It was he who solved the enigma such cases posed, less by the seduction theory than by the theories of the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality that replaced it in importance, without eliminating it entirely...

...He reproduces the title pages of French and German works on child abuse and murder, presumably to give tangibility to the argument that Freud was influenced by and then chose to ignore them...

...The same might be said of modern sensation-seekers, including authors and their publishers, to judge from this book...

...Masson, of course, is not the only one to regret Freud's relative neglect of the seduction approach...

...It leads us back to Freud himself, reminding us that those who come after are often not so much dwarfs on the shoulders of the giant as dwarfs kicking at his shins...

...This is a problem Masson might have addressed when speaking of the limitations of psychoanalysis...

...Readers who check there will see the crux of his thesis that a sexually traumatic act (or acts) in childhood (often not detectable physically), whose memory is repressed, may lead to hysteria later on...

...The letter ends with Freud's poignant realization that his expected fame and wealth would have to be relinquished: "Everything depended upon whether hysteria would come out right...

...Some may say in his defense that he is being attacked on personal rather than intellectual grounds...

...Freud certainly may not be referring to that first hemorrhage —there were others...

...Yet if it were not for particular elements—one might even call them gifts—of his personality, he would not be receiving attention at all...

...Nonetheless, he gives the impression that he is taking on the entire psychoanalytic establishment single-handedly...

...In his privileged, albeit temporary, position he had access to unpublished papers that few had seen besides Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler, the venerable analyst and Secretary of the Archives...

...Actually, there is little that is damaging to Freud in the letters Masson quotes, nor should Freud and his followers have to be perfect, whatever the abuse they may be subjected to...

...The best way to avoid future assaults of this kind might be to stop sheltering unpublished materials...

...I shall be able to prove to you that you were right, that her episodes of bleeding were hysterical, were occasioned by longing, and probably occurred at the sexually relevant times...

...And this failure, the author charges, undermined the entire foundation of psychoanalysis...

...In Masson's reading— or misreading—it is out-and-out bru-talization that produces "neurosis," a term he uses interchangeably and mis-leadingly with Freud's much more specific "hysteria...

...Mas-son's use of texts in general is reminiscent of what nursery school teachers call parallel play: He pairs them side by side despite their lacking causal connections...

...That he appears incapable of the effort is a matter best left to analysts...

...His "evidence," however, is a tissue of gross generalizations, speculations offered as proof, repetitions, distortions, and non sequiturs, served up in a fashion that sometimes borders on the pornographic...

...Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of Freud's seduction theory, Mas-son's version of it amounts to an invention of his own...

...As a result, Masson now claims to have discovered that Freud ultimately rejected his 1896 seduction theory not because he lacked sufficient evidence, but out of "a personal failure of courage...

...The most appropriate response to Jeffrey Masson's evident exhibitionism and desire for punishment would be a blank page, but the circumstances surrounding his work have given it a certain notoriety that cannot be ignored...