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In the Freud Archives

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Malcolm's masterly study of the uproar over Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's fight with the trustees of the Freud Archives has been out of print for years, despite the famous controversy (and multiple libel suits) the book itself occasioned upon its publication. It has been deservedly been brought back into print into this nifty little edition by the NYRB Press, featuring on its cover one of Malcolm's own fascinating collage pieces. Like all of Janet Malcolm's later work, it centers around fierce intellectual debates concerning the ownership and representation of ideas, and the enormous cruelties academics and writers are willing to wage upon one another in the name of "truth." Also, like all her subsequent work, IN THE FREUD ARCHIVES centers upon the inherent problems of bias in narrative, and how aggrieved individuals often betray themselves (as in psychoanalysis) when they most want to win an audience's confidence. Although Masson sued Malcolm (ultimately unsuccessfully) for his portrayal in this study, he might even be thankful that she has immortalized him (more than his own writings ever may) as a fantastic and mercurial character.

Janet Malcolm's study of the controversy over the Freud Archives is one of the finest pieces of non-fiction of the last twenty years. It deals with the appointment of Jeffrey Masson as head of the Freud Archives, his subsequent discovery and publication of much of Freud's correspondence, and his claims that Freud's abandonment of the "seduction theory" invalidates the entire discipline of psychoanalysis - and the bomb this planted beneath the reputation of Freud and the field he pioneered.

The story has been knocking about ever since. Briefly, Freud had at first believed his patients' claims that they had been sexually abused in childhood. This is the "seduction theory" of neurosis - that neuroses derive from actual physical abuse. After a while, as these claims were made by more and more patients, he (rightly or wrongly) came to believe that they couldn't all be true, and developed the theory of the Oedipus complex - that we are all more or less neurotic, as a result of unavoidable psychological events that are part of everyone's early childhood. Psychoanalysis at once became immeasurably more complex, less ambitious and more speculative.

When Jeffrey Masson, a former Sanskrit scholar who had trained as an analyst but whose instincts were those of a scholar, came across the story of how Freud had changed his mind, he immediately started to claim that this was pretty much the end of psychoanalysis. Whether it is or not is up for the reader to decide. What's most riveting about this book is Masson himself.

I don't want to say anything outright derogatory about Masson, as he has a taste for litigation - he sued Malcolm about the book, and carried the case on for 11 years until he eventually lost. But he seems like the last person you'd want to involve in such a tricky practice as the healing of people's minds. Malcolm lets him speak for himself, and he comes across in her portrayal of him as a really awful person - smug, arrogant, remarkably incurious and with almost no capacity for considering the feelings of other people. Amazingly clever, to be sure; but how they ever let him train as an analyst is beyond me (he gave it up after hardly anyone referred him any patients.) He admits to Malcolm that he has a short attention span; one of the most shocking - and to me, rather appalling - statements he makes is when he forcefully denies Malcolm's remark that nothing is intrinsically interesting, that we invest things with interest. No, Masson insists, some things are objectively interesting and some are not, and psychoanalysis is one of the things that isn't. Such is his sense of responsibility for the damage he'd done.

After a while, Masson's ruthless lack of curiosity, his urge to deny and denigrate (he once considered writing a book about what was wrong with various societies in the world, but fortunately for us he abandoned the idea) makes him appear as a kind of smooth, plausible angel of death. And yet, his charm almost won Malcolm over - until he sued her. The man is obviously very intelligent. But what a way to use your gifts.

Wow. Generally I don't bother to review titles that have already been lauded or panned, but I enjoyed this recently beyond all measure. Originally a series of articles in the New Yorker, I came upon it in book form, strikingly after being dissapointed in a book I read by Masson, one of the protagonists in this small morality tale. Jeffrey ends up being eviscerated by his own words as this small fable of misplaced trust and ego unfolds. Malcolm is the sly and small narrator that undoes him by lending an ear, and in the meantime the Freud legacy is both exposed and intelligently defended. What makes this book 5 instead of 4 stars are the slight brilliant insights of Malcolm herself that occasionally highlight the factual action. The fact that this is journalism that provides wisdom is what brings it up to literatures doorstep. Brilliant.

Though under 150 pages in length, In the Freud Archives is so complex that, to serve the potential purchaser of this book, I want to confine my comments to the writer's craft, that is, to how Janet Malcolm constructed her tale, and to how her book and its topic of the Sigmund Freud legacy might have changed since the book was first published in 1984.

There is clearly a central "character," a protagonist, in this book: Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. The opening pages of In the Freud Archives recount Masson's personal charm and dazzling intellect as he begins to appear at psychoanalytic conferences (which lead to his meeting with the most important of the four or five other "characters," Kurt Eissler, the Secretary or head of the Freud Archives). Note that throughout the book, author Malcolm gives more pages to Masson than to anyone else, the final pages of the book are Masson's words, and he is the only person Malcolm shows in the intimacy of his home with his family. Masson seems to be the perfect "main character" because of his internal conflicts (which he makes visible, as Malcolm recounts them). Very quickly, we find out that Masson's words and actions are uncivil, bad-tempered, and generally destructive of friendships; though other people in the book are also similarly flawed, they seem not to have redeeming qualities (as he does).

As the narrative progresses, its as though Malcolm realizes that Masson's situation makes the most compelling narrative and she wanted to record moments which "save" him; in other words, it seems to me that there is little to redeem Eissler, Peter Swales, or Anna Freud, but Malcolm gives Masson some moments of truth. For example, at the end of the book, in Jeff Masson's home with Denise, there is a bit of dialogue which Malcolm records that shows Masson does let someone (an intimate friend) question him about his manners. And at two points in the book, Malcolm records Masson saying that the results of psychoanalysis (the conclusions drawn by the analyst about the patient) don't matter as much as how the patient feels about his or her life. Masson asks, "What do you do with something like Auschwitz?" Masson asks this in the context of psychoanalysts' debates on the patient's "reality" versus "fantasy."

A great deal of what In the Freud Archives is about has to do with the current value of psychoanalysis, i.e., its efficacy in assisting the patient to recover happiness in life. If Masson was disgusted with psychoanalysts and their work, and this disgust led him to disgust with Freud and his legacy (thus leading to his being fired from the Archives job), then I wish Malcolm had written more about that point of disgust (at which Masson began to turn away). (However, she meant her book to show the relationship of everyone involved as Freud and his legacy mutated in the 1970s.) Clearly, to me, a key turning point in the narrative occurs when Masson says, "The business of analysis is to . . . get to the [patient's] pain and the sorrow. But they [the analysts] were arguing that there is no such thing as reality--that there is no single Auschwitz. That is the worst thing that analysis has left the world: the notion that there is no reality, that there are only individual experiences of it" (56-57). Be that as it may, or for what it's worth, other people in the book don't have moments of truth like this; Masson doesn't look as "bad" in this book as he thought back in 1984. It's unfortunate that he did not see that. Of course, slowly, but surely, In the Freud Archives is becoming fiction; sooner or later all nonfiction does.

Simply put, this book is a must read if you, the reader, want to be a student of life and of the era in which we live. Along those lines, it seems that because of the value of "pop psychology" and "self-help" books, the legacy of Freud and his archives are no longer worth fighting over because people in general see little at stake in Freud's interpretations of life or of our interpretations of his private life. Also, we live in the era of Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Stephen Covey, and Landmark Education, Inc. However, a general idea people might agree on is that Freud and his work came into being (in Europe) because the rising middle-class people had a sense of their own misery in an era of rapid industrial development and technological change. Analysis, or psycho-therapy or therapeutic counseling, or "self-help"--whatever you call it--responds to the basic human desire to have positive change in life--and to be at peace.

Malcolm's book is a chronicle of intellectual history, a tale of that specific time in the 1970s and 1980s when such fights among intellectuals could take place. The copyright on Malcolm's "Afterword" for the NYRB edition is 1997--now ten years ago.

I read this years ago when it originally appeared in The New Yorker. Though I don't usually reread things, I remembered being very impressed by it at the time and had also recently read Janet Malcolm's "The Journalist & the Murderer" which discussed "In the Freud Archives" a bit and tells a story of a similar ill-fated relationship between a narcissistic man and a second man who either manipulates or is manipulated by the other. "The Journalist..." looks into the practices of journalism, and "Freud Archives" looks into psychoanalysis, but both have to do with the process of extracting and interpreting information (which Malcolm herself is doing) and the human emotions (and lawsuits) that emerge in this process. "Freud Archives" has as least three striking central characters, one of whom (Masson) is perhaps the most memorable person I've ever encountered reading nonfiction. He's a brilliant man who, in Malcolm's telling of the story, has a mind that seeks to break down the elaborate structures others have devoted their life to building up. You can decide whether he's performing a service or deserves condemnation for this.

The book is beautifully written, full of lively monologues by Masson and others, and a quick read at 165 pages.

Very well written and captivating non-fiction story about the intrigues around the Sigmund Freud Archives. The character descriptions are interesting, and we are also given some insights into the history and concepts of psychoanalysis. This is done without the text becoming too theoretical. In the Freud Archives is not difficult to read. After reading the postscript I wondered a little about Janet Malcolms use of sources. She is not exactly kind towards Masson, and maybe she betrays him by putting into text words not intended to.I don't know, there was some controversy after the first publication. Anyway, the book is great.

Wow!

This concise primer on Freud's legacy details the evidence behind his theories, profiles three characters who fight over their origins and significance, and questions the wisdom of restricting access to the Freud archives. A brilliant work that fascinates, illuminates, and documents - and deserves to be read by all psychology students. Hint: Freud's conclusion that his female patients were fantasizing about sexual abuse seems more arrogant and less plausible than ever. Further, the decision to keep key source documents locked away in the Freud archives until 2102 emphasizes the lack of transparency and secretive, almost sect-like style of Freud in creating his new "scientific" discipline.

A very entertaining, intellectual, and rather disturbing read for a breezy summer day!

This small well written book is really nothing but a bit of fluffy gossip. But gossip that will delight anyone who has found themselves caught up in the now-venerable controversy surrounding both Jeffrey Masson's book: "The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory" and the furor among Freud followers that resulted from it's publication. Through personal interviews, Ms.Malcolm gives us the lowdown on the brilliant but (to say the least) quirky Mr. Masson as well as most of the other surviving characters (as of 1983) involved in Masson's brief yet productive romance with the keepers of Freud's well guarded letters and library.

Perhaps the surprise here...or lack of surprise, is that those such as Masson, who attempt to push the understanding of any intellectual field beyond it's comfortable boundries will, perhaps out of necessity, find themselves snooping around its often dangerous edges. And perhaps because of the hornet's nest they may stir up, are often a bit on the edgy side themselves.

Malcolm does a fine job of exposing us to Masson's truly obnoxious character, and yet raises a larger unasked question. Does eccentricity alone invalidate an individual's research and ideas, or when one dares to take on the giants, is that same eccentricity a necessity?

Whatever the answer, the almost 25 year tandem printing history of these two volumes speaks to the apparent importance of the contentions reguarding Freud that the voracious Masson dared to raise.

And perhaps simply through daring to raise them, Masson finds his victory.

I read this book in two days. Granted, its not that long (originally printed in two issues of The New Yorker)but it has a page-turner quality that one might not expect from an expose' of intellectuals. Front and center is Jeffrey Moussaiff Masson, a psychoanalytic wunderkind who comes out of nowhere in the early Eighties to mount a full-scale charm offensive with those who literally hold the keys to the Freud archives. Janet Malcom succeeds at telling the story of these outsized personalities while also illuminating the central flaws of Freudian theory, and these are no small flaws. When Freud abandoned the seduction theory (children are not molested by adults, they fantasize about being molested by adults!) he began to develop his grand crystal palace of the human mind. Femininists, social workers and multitudes of therapists have been been rightfully registering their dissent ever since, but it was Masson's turn in the New York Times op-ed page (the Joseph Wilson of psycho-analysis) that brought this important debate back into the light. This is a lively tour through the people and personalities who have taken it upon themselves to protect and challenge the legacy of Sigmund Freud.

A delicious read: insightful, provocative, and great fun. Malcolm is one of my cultural heroes. The afterword strikes a sour note, but one can understand why.