Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (born 1941) is a Sanskrit specialist and author who trained as a psychoanalyst in Toronto, Canada. During his training, he became close friends with the psychoanalyst Kurt Eissler, and later became acquainted with Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's daughter. He briefly served as projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives but was dismissed amid controversy over his critical analysis of Freud's motives. He currently writes on a wide range of subjects, perhaps most successfully on animal rights philosophy.

Life and work

Masson was earmarked by an elderly Eissler to succeed him as the director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in the event of his, and Anna Freud's, death: one of the highest positions for an analyst in psychoanalytic circles. In the meantime Masson learned German, specialized in the history of psychoanalysis and was appointed projects director of the Freud Archives.

After gaining access to Freud's correspondence, Masson elaborated the hypothesis that, in order to advance the cause of psychoanalysis, and in part to maintain his own place within the psychoanalytic inner circle, Freud had rejected his so-called seduction theory, that childhood reports of sexual abuse were real, and that Freud developed instead the theory that many, if not most, of such reports were fantasy.

As Masson recounts in Final Analysis, word of his controversial position reached the New Yorker Magazine, and after Masson was interviewed by a reporter his theories were published in the New Yorker to the dismay of the psychoanalytic establishment. Shortly thereafter he was removed from his job as project director of the Freud Archives, and he left the psychoanalytic organizations he belonged to and wrote several books critical of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychiatry. He wrote a quite critical book about a guru: My Father's Guru: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion, too.

In psychoanalytical circles there has been significant criticism of Masson's hypothesis about Freud's alleged suppression of abuse. On the other hand, and contrary to the popular view, Masson has argued that Freud did not grasp the nature of psychological trauma.

Lately Masson has written several books on the emotional life of animals. When Elephants Weep has been translated into twenty languages. At one time he was engaged to Catharine A. MacKinnon, who wrote the preface to A Dark Science. He is now married to Leila Rubina Masson, a pediatrician from Berlin, and living in New Zealand after residing in Berkeley, California for some time.

Quotations from Final Analysis

To me, looking at other people in terms of what is wrong with them —these gradations of disturbance— was and is distasteful. Always implicit in the doctor's view is, of course, how much more "healthy" you are than they. And this is almost never the case (page 94).

Ferenczi was considered paranoid for believing his women patients; the men's confessions were not even discussed. Ernest Jones, the powerful English analyst who had been Ferenczi's analysand, now took up the cudgel against him in deadly seriousness. Jones let it be known after Ferenczi's death in 1933 (he died a few months after the quarrel with Freud) that he was really a homicidal maniac. While I was in London working in the Jones archives I discovered what this really meant: Jones believed that to disagree with Freud (the father) was tantamount to patricide (father murder). And so, because Ferenczi believed that children were sexually abused and Freud did not, Ferenczi was branded by Jones as a homicidal maniac, and this piece of scurrilous interpretation stuck (page 152).

Somewhat to my surprise, I was accepted for membership in the society San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society. I was looking forward to giving my inaugural paper, "The Navel of Neurosis: Trauma, Memory and Denial," the one I had written with my wife, Terri, and which Schiffer analyst had claimed as his (page 136).

Because I was so eager to believe I was being helped by a talented, ethical, benevolent, and intelligent man, I sought evidence for this wherever I could. Anything less than this was too dreadful to contemplate (page 40).

I was thrilled. I loved the idea of opening everything up, of making old and secret documents available to anybody who wished to see them. (page 183)

Almost all analysts in America are physicians and psychiatrists, and the medical profession is layered into a strict hierarchy. Every psychiatrist in a hospital is chief of some service, or head of some department. (page 145)

To this day I am not entirely certain what it was in the article that so infuriated the analytic community. But there can be no doubt about the severity of the anger, even rage, directed at me. The two-part article was published in the "Science" section of the Times on two successive Tuesdays, August 14, and August 21,1981. (page 193)

Anna Freud

From a discussion with Sigmund Freud’s daughter:

“Terri is Jewish, she survived the Warsaw Ghetto, and I am also Jewish, and both of us have been immersed in holocaust literature. We are puzzled why so little has been written about the holocaust in psychoanalysis”.

“I am puzzled by your puzzlement”, she replied immediately. “Why should psychoanalysts in particular write about the war?”

“Because so many Jewish analysts are refugees from Nazism”.

“But that has nothing to do with psychoanalysis”.

“But doesn’t trauma play a central role in analytic theory?” Anna Freud shrugged her shoulders, apparently dismissing my concerns as uninteresting. I was deeply disappointed. Anna Freud was Jewish ^*.

I tried again.

“I know that your father never wrote anything about the Nazis, but he must have talked to you about it. What did he say?”

She simply shrugged her shoulders, and sat silently. I could not tell if she meant that he had told her nothing, or if she did not intend to tell me anything (pages 154f).

Anna Freud, again

While working at Anna Freud's house, I found an unpublished letter in which he told Fliess, less than two weeks after he gave the paper Aetiology of Hysteria, "I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me." Both the immediate response to the paper, and the subsequent response were ones that Freud had not anticipated: his colleagues thought he was crazy to believe his women patients. This was bound to have a disastrous impact on a young physician with a growing family, eager to open a neurological/psychiatric clinical practice. Where were his referrals to come from, if his colleagues thought he was completely daft? I made this point to Anna Freud.

"Do you believe", I said, "that this could have had anything to do with his later abandonment of the theory?"

"No." She was adamant.

"But tell me, Miss Freud, why did you omit this passage from your published edition of the letters?"

"Because it makes my father sound so paranoid," was her response.

"But if it was the truth, then he was not paranoid, he was simply perceptive." (pages 175, 176)

Masson's books

The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing.
He edited The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904.
A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality and Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century
Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of A Psychoanalyst, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1990, ISBN 0-201-52368-X.
The Oceanic Feeling: The Origins of Religious Sentiment in Ancient India
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, My Father's Guru: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion, Addison-Wesley (1993), ISBN 0201567784
Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs
When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Life of Animals
The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals
The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey Into the Feline Heart
The Peacock's Egg: Love Poems from Ancient India (Paperback) by W. S. Merwin (Editor), J. Moussaieff Masson (Editor) ISBN 0865470596
The Emperors Embrace Reflections On Animal Families And Fatherhood
The Evolution of Fatherhood: A Celebration of Animal and Human Families (Paperback)
Lost Prince : The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser
Slipping into Paradise Why I live in New Zealand ISBN 0-345-46634-9

External links