19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Janet Malcolm at her best, January 5, 2003
This review is from: In the Freud Archives (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
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.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Too good to be called journalism, November 20, 2000
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.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Journalism becomes almost literature, July 10, 2002
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.
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