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The assault on truth. Freud's suppression of the seduction theory

that data from the Lamarckian phrenologist H. C. Watson, rationalizing this on the grounds that Watson had uncovered transcendentally true facts that were now free for the taking (p. 180). This, indeed, is rich material on the plight of the "outsider" in a professionalizing culture. Adrian Desmond JEFFREY M. MASSON, The assault on truth. Freud's suppression of the seduction theory, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux; London, Faber, 1984, 8vo, pp. 308, £9.96. Nothing sells books like scandals. The spate of biographies and autobiographies of the Watergate culprits would be proof enough of this. But here we have a scandal in the academy. The chosen heir of the Freud Archives goes public (in the New York Times, no less) and claims that Freud was a fraud. Jeffrey Masson's struggle with the Freud Archives and the psychoanalytic establishment's rejection of him and his views on Freud have coloured every review of this book. It is the scandal about Masson, not the book, which has been reviewed. I come to this book with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I doubt the "truth" of The assault on truth; on the other, as a philologist turned medical historian, I am in great sympathy with Masson, a philologist turned medical historian. Let me begin with what is evidently wrong with the book. Masson's thesis is, quite simply, that Freud turned away from the seduction theory for the aetiology of neurosis (a theory which Masson implies is valid) because of his transference with his friend Wilhelm Fliess. Fliess' incompetence had led to a near fatality in the treatment of one of Freud's patients. Freud wished to dismiss this and was forced to see the error in the patient's response. This pattern, once established, dominated Freud's perception of his patients' illnesses and led him to reject all "reality" as the source of neurosis and substitute "imagination". Masson's case is, as many commentators have pointed out, weak. First, Freud never rejected sexual abuse of children as a "reality". As late as the 1920s, he commented on a case of sexual abuse in order to differentiate it from the fantasies of sexuality omnipresent in childhood. Freud's knowledge of such abuse, to which Masson devotes a chapter, was never in question. He, like all medical practitioners, knew the general medical and legal literature on child abuse. The legal literature was usually summarized in the back of most medical textbooks! That Freud attempted to shield Fliess is without doubt true, and here is where the material in the book is interesting. Max Schur began the unravelling of the background to the key dreams in the Traumdeutung in an often-quoted piece in the Hartmann Festschrift. Masson continues this and provides much detailed information. His chapter on Emma Eckstein is a valuable addendum to Schur. But is his interpretation right? Schur and Masson are valuable precisely because no one else has had access to the manuscript material. We will have to rely on this interpretation until the German originals (not Masson's translation) appear. At that point we shall be able to stop reading the Freud-Fliess relationship as pentimento through the interpretations of scholars with axes to grind. Here the Freud Archives have done themselves, as well as the history of medicine, a disservice. Either close the material or open it! Stop playing games with favourites, either in regard to the Marie Bonaparte material or the Freud material. Let qualified scholars use it, so that each forms a check on the others, or let no one use it and some lucky scholar born about now will uncover it long after our deaths, like the Boswell papers, hidden in the loft of the Library of Congress. Masson's book has a specific thesis. But many scholars will mine it for quotes and innuendoes in spite of the thesis because Masson, at least, had access to the material. Masson's book is not good history of science. It is not Sulloway or Ellenberger. But it will be used. In spite of my own sympathy with Masson as a philologist turned historian I am not convinced by his argument. Indeed, I am quite appalled at his use of evidence, which is spotty and superficial, guilt by association and omission. His book is shaped by the scandal his views raised in the psychoanalytic establishment. Psychoanalysis survived Freud's mistakes and will certainly survive Masson's. The underlying truths of the psyche as outlined by Freud (not those coloured by his age and time) are not affected by his motivation. Did Galileo's fudging of his mathematical evidence to disprove Ptolemy mean that the sun did revolve about the earth? So too the discussion of Freud (especially when undertaken in analytic terms) does not undermine the validity of his views. Here Masson should read Juliet Mitchell in some detail.