In the Freud Archives

Janet Malcolm

4 ideas

1. Masson's rise and fall at the Archives

   Jeffrey Masson, a Sanskrit professor turned psychoanalyst, won the trust of Kurt Eissler, the elderly head of the Sigmund Freud Archives, who named him successor and gave him access to Freud's unexpurgated letters to Wilhelm Fliess. In 1981 Masson publicly argued, in a lecture and in New York Times interviews, that Freud had abandoned the seduction theory out of cowardice rather than scientific conviction. Eissler and the analytic establishment then dismissed him as projects director of the Archives.

2. Seduction theory versus fantasy theory

   In 1897 Freud abandoned his view that neurosis stems from actual childhood sexual abuse. He replaced it with the view that patients' memories often reflect unconscious wishes and fantasies. That shift founded psychoanalysis's claim to study inner psychic reality. Masson's counter-claim that the abuse was real threatens the discipline at its root, which explains why the establishment reacted so violently.

3. Institutional feuds re-enact the theory's dramas

   Malcolm reads the Archives quarrel through the psychoanalytic patterns it concerns. A father figure adopts a brilliant son as heir, and the son proves himself by attacking the father's legacy. The feud turns into the Oedipal and transferential dynamics the institution exists to study. Its members are not immune to the forces they theorize about; they act them out.

4. Guarded archives breed outsider revisionism

   Guardians like Eissler kept Freud's papers sealed and selectively released to protect his reputation. That secrecy gave document access great value and made every withheld letter look like concealment. Ambitious outsiders were drawn to the gaps. Self-taught investigator Peter Swales, for example, built a theory that Freud had an affair with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays. Protective secrecy thus produces the scandalous reinterpretations it is meant to prevent.

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