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In the Freud Archives

by Janet Malcolm, A.O. Scott (Introduction)

4.19 of 5 stars 4.19 · rating details · 240 ratings · 31 reviews

Includes an afterword by the author

In the Freud Archives tells the story of an unlikely encounter among three men: K. R. Eissler, the venerable doyen of psychoanalysis; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a flamboyant, restless forty-two-year-old Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst turned virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a mischievous thirty-five-year-old former assista...more

Paperback, 162 pages

Published November 30th 2002 by NYRB Classics (first published January 1st 1983)

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Apr 21, 2013 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: mentalillness

THE VERY BRAINY PIGLET

This book had as many twists and turns as a very brainy greased piglet and it's hard to write a review as we are talking about Lofty Matters here. But here goes. At the time Sigmund Freud was figuring out his vast theories he was one quack amongst many quacks. His theories were later accepted by many and his fellow quacks were consigned to the bin of history, so that makes him Not A Quack. This is a very important fact. The crux of the argument around which this book pivots...more THE VERY BRAINY PIGLET

This book had as many twists and turns as a very brainy greased piglet and it's hard to write a review as we are talking about Lofty Matters here. But here goes. At the time Sigmund Freud was figuring out his vast theories he was one quack amongst many quacks. His theories were later accepted by many and his fellow quacks were consigned to the bin of history, so that makes him Not A Quack. This is a very important fact. The crux of the argument around which this book pivots so gracefully (speaking as a Freudian ignoramus, I have read maybe two introductions to Freud) is as follows.

THE SEDUCTION THEORY (NO PIGLETS INVOLVED)

In the beginning Freud treats women suffering from "hysteria". I think we would now call this neurosis. He hypnotises them. No, not with his personal charm, with actual hypnosis. They tell him (under hypnosis) stories of sexual abuse inflicted upon them by their male family members, usually the father. Freud is staggered and comes up with his Seduction Theory. The abuse suffered by these women has caused their hysteria. Sounds logical. But he uses the word seduction when we would use the word abuse or rape, and so right there we have a problem. Seduction? Did he mean any of the implications we now hear in this word? Don't know.
So then three years later he changed his mind. For various reasons* he abandoned the Seduction Theory and concluded that all this stuff he was hearing was fantasy, made up by the patient. ("the neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful fantasies" - SF). So then he came upon his whole Oedipus complex theory &c, and thereby invented psychoanalysis.

ANOTHER VERY BRAINY PIGLET

Time passes as does Dr Freud, and his ten tons of manuscripts and letters are placed in an archive which becomes known as "the archive". It resides in the Freud Museum in London. In the 1970s along comes the antihero of this book, shagadelic Jeffrey Masson who by enormous zest and charm becomes adopted by the grizzled Dr Eissler as the next Keeper of the Freud Archive. All the older staid analysts in the Freud business are insanely affronted, like as if Mick Jagger just slept with their daughter and she bragged about it. (It's so easy to have fun with the Freudians). But sexy young Masson has his imp of the perverse working day and night for him and whilst on probation for this ultimate job does lectures and interviews and articles in which he denounces Freud - yes, according to Masson the sexual abuse spoken of by Freud's patients was real, not fantasy, and Freud rejected the Seduction Theory simply because it was fatal for psychoanalysis.
This accusation is stunning. I am not aware of any great denunciations of Freud by feminists but as soon as modern feminists themselves became aware of the prevalence of sexual abuse of children (suppressed by society for so many years) they should have been all over Freud like a nasty rash exposing him as one of the chief deniers of the unpleasant facts about the abuse of children. Maybe they were, I don't get out much.
Anyway, according to Masson, psychoanalysts proceed on the understanding that there is no essential difference between fantasy and reality, that it doesn't really matter if abuse has taken place or not, the point is to get the patient to a place where she is not being crippled by her perceived problem. Not sure if that's correct but there's a whole Recovered Memory/False Memory industry out there willing to argue the point in court. Man. this stuff is thorny! No - hard to keep hold of, like a piglet. No sense in changing metaphors now.

THE THIRD AND FINAL PIGLET

Unfortunately for me, this book is about the big rift between the various personalities here, Masson, Eissler and another weird character, the former Rolling Stones gofer turned punk historian (seriously) Peter J Swales. Therefore it is a meeting about a meeting, and once I got a third way through this I did not want to bother with these curous people anymore, I wanted to find out what has happened to the Seduction Theory in modern psychothinking.
So yes this book is a splendid piece of journalism but by reading it I found it wasn't the book I should have been reading. That's ironic, right?

* one reason that in a world of escalating antisemitism, and given that all his patients were Jewish, a theory which flatly stated that there was a lot of sexual abuse going on within families would be just more grist for the Nazi mill.(less)

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Aug 01, 2009 Jimmy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nyrb, female, non-fiction, year-1980s

"You have allowed me, in a show of great confidence, to go through your cupboard."

A very interesting book, full of twists and turns and drama-queens masquerading as Freud scholars. Also, it was quite funny in parts. Ultimately I felt like it was maybe too harsh on Masson and not critical enough of Eissler. I found Eissler's nature to protect Freud's legacy very suspect. And I was never convinced that Masson's theories were wrong (at least we can safely say his main point is blatantly correct, no...more

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May 29, 2010 Hanny rated it 3 of 5 stars

It’s hard to be sympathetic to Jeffrey Masson after all the nonsense of the libel trial, but it’s hard not to be after reading this book.

First things first: Malcolm didn’t make anything up; she didn’t misrepresent Masson; she didn’t libel him. The details are laid out well in an article by Robert Broyton in The Village Voice (http://www.robertboynton.com/articleD...). The most important one, seldom mentioned by Malcolm’s detractors, is the fact that Masson sued Malcolm three times. In the first...more It’s hard to be sympathetic to Jeffrey Masson after all the nonsense of the libel trial, but it’s hard not to be after reading this book.

First things first: Malcolm didn’t make anything up; she didn’t misrepresent Masson; she didn’t libel him. The details are laid out well in an article by Robert Broyton in The Village Voice (http://www.robertboynton.com/articleD...). The most important one, seldom mentioned by Malcolm’s detractors, is the fact that Masson sued Malcolm three times. In the first two rounds, every statement he disputed was found on tape. For the third round, he listened to all of the tapes and disputed passages that weren’t in them. By the time the trial started, things were down to five sentences. Read them in context, and see if cutting them would have made the slightest difference. (It would not have.)

On to the book. In the early 80’s, Masson was made head of the Freud Archives, a ridiculous organization overseen by Anna Freud, some Eisler character, and a group of Freudian ideologues intent on blocking access to Freud’s letters, drafts, and so forth, the better to maintain the standard view of the good doctor. (Some of the documents won’t be released until after 2100.) Masson, an impolitic young scholar, was nearly put in charge of the organization. He immediately started making enemies, lost the job, and lost his standing as a psychoanalyst.

What happened? Primarily, Masson disputed Freud’s abandonment of the “seduction theory”: the notion that “hysteria” (as he called it at the time) was founded on real traumas in his patients’ pasts. He later came to the view that all of these traumas were fictions, and that the analyst’s job was to discover why patients construct one fantasy rather than another. Hence, psychoanalysis. What Masson found is that Freud suppressed knowledge of real traumas some of his patients suffered in order to further the notion that it was all Oedipal Complexity. Masson focused more (too much) on whether Freud knew he was doing this and had a guilty conscience about it than on the much more interesting question of whether it should have been done at all. Either way, this is an important find, but you won’t learn much about it in Malcolm’s book.

I haven’t read Masson (or enough Freud) so I can’t say much more. However, Malcolm could have. In her contemporary articles in The New Yorker Review of Books, she revealed herself as a brilliant student of psychoanalytic theory. (Her article on transference is fantastic.) Here, she doesn’t explore Masson’s actual claims very deeply at all. Bizarre as this might sound, I blame this on the anti-intellectualism of The New Yorker. Characters? Sure. Their ideas? In passing, tongue firmly in cheek. Wouldn’t want to be snobs.

As far as profiling goes, the most interesting passages about Masson are the last ones in the book, describing his inability to maintain interest in anything for an extended period of time. A friend of Masson’s suggests the reason: he is only interested in disputing bad theories, and “anti” is easy and sterile. This is fine, but the majority of the book is taken over to questions of Masson’s foolishness, and the silly, brash way he conducted himself in the psychoanalytic community. But what about that community itself? Does Masson deserve to be upbraided a bit for his behavior and his more ridiculous theories? Sure. (Broyton reports that Malcolm left out Masson’s idea about fucking around the world in order to make a cultural catalogue of women’s hang-ups.) But Anna Freud and Eisler blocked access to important documents in order to maintain a necessarily false view of an important figure. Who committed the greater crime? Malcolm seems to be on the side of the Freud archivists. Strange.(less)

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Aug 21, 2011 Erik Graff rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: those interested in psychoanalysis and Freud

Recommended to Erik by: no one

Shelves: psychology

Were I to rate a book solely in terms of readability and interest, this one would get a five. The topic, J.M. Masson's dispute with the Freud Archives, however, is of less than world-historical importance. Having had some exposure to the psychoanalytic community while studying depth psychology in NYC and having read Masson's book on the affair, Assault on the Truth, I found it fascinating, reading it cover to cover in a single sitting. Now I want to go ahead and read more of Masson and Swales on...more Were I to rate a book solely in terms of readability and interest, this one would get a five. The topic, J.M. Masson's dispute with the Freud Archives, however, is of less than world-historical importance. Having had some exposure to the psychoanalytic community while studying depth psychology in NYC and having read Masson's book on the affair, Assault on the Truth, I found it fascinating, reading it cover to cover in a single sitting. Now I want to go ahead and read more of Masson and Swales on psychoanalysis.

The dispute around which this book centers was primarily caused by Archive Director Masson's claim--to the NY Times!--that Freud had suppressed evidence about the etiological importance of childhood sexual experiences ('abuse') with older relatives, substituting for it his theories of infantile sexuality and Oedipal conflict--in other word, those theories which are arguably central to psychoanalysis.

In fact, Freud did move from a more to a less accepting attitude towards analysand's stories of childhood sex abuse at around the end of the nineteenth century. Masson's claim of suppression is exaggerated if taken to mean that Freud consciously distorted evidence--though it may be the case that his growing reluctance to take such memories at face value was overdetermined by personal psychological factors such as his own illicit sexual experiences, the fact that the supposed sexual preditors were often the same men who were paying their daughter's bills and a general social antipathy towards anyone repeating (and believing)_such claims. This notwithstanding, Freud never denied that there were indubitable cases of childhood sex abuse. He just came to believe that they were rare, much rarer than neurotic adults having false memories of such.

Masson was right, however, in saying that one's attitude towards infantile sexuality is a lynchpin of psychoanalysis and Malcolm's description of his claims and the psychanalytic community's responses to them is evidence of that. (less)

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Feb 17, 2008 Charles rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of my favorite books of all time. Janet Malcolm writes with a poison pen, but sees with extreme lucidity. She is a searchlight in a greenhouse, withering whatever catches her attention. Here, she turns her vision on a favorite subject: the world of psychoanalysis.

A controversy between a trio of psychoanalysts becomes an exploration of ambition, intellectual obsession, the practice of and institutions around psychoanalysis, the problems of history...

The subject of the conflict is the birth o...more

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Feb 22, 2010 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: groups-of-people, leetle-boys

Fun. I mean, certainly not of interest to everyone, but if you've ever given half a shit about Freud (which you should) and if the idea of reading about a bunch of lunatic analysts and deranged academic infighting doesn't actively turn you off, I definitely recommend In the Freud Archives. Also, it might enhance enjoyment if you've got ties to Berkeley or Manhattan.... There is an Oscar-winning screenplay waiting to be plucked from these pages. Helen Mirren will get best supporting actress for h...more

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Sep 03, 2010 DoctorM rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, pop-culture, sexuality-and-gender

A book that surprised me--- and my first introduction to Janet Malcolm, who became one of my favourite writers. "In the Freud Archives" is a kind of family romance: an account of hopes, histories, filial affections given and betrayed, legacies despoiled, and savagely incestuous in-fighting amongst the intellectual heirs of Freud.

Malcolm grew up in the world of 1950s and early '60s psychoanalysis, a world where (remember Woody Allen's early routines?) Freudian theory was taken as a given and edu...more

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Apr 12, 2012 M Thompson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Janet Malcolm says precisely what needs to be said in a voice that is elegant and deadly. The Journalist and the Murderer is, yes, brilliant, even required reading, though there's a perverse corner to my mind that enjoyed this book more. Perhaps it's glimpsing into the obsessive and strange, increasingly irrelevant world of psychoanalysis that appeals to me, or the way Malcolm dismantles Freudian psychology while framing her characters in a lurid Oedipal struggle. Then again, I suppose with anyt...more

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Jun 17, 2009 Dave rated it 5 of 5 stars

Janet Malcolm is a superb writer. She was recommended to me by a Professor of Psychoanalysis (and let's be honest, that's a fairly reasonable recommendation, wouldn't you say?) - specifically the books 'Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession' and 'In the Freud Archives'. Absolutely brilliant work, both of them.

I'd read anything by Janet Malcolm.

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Jun 27, 2009 Molly rated it 4 of 5 stars

I loved this twisted-up tale of intrigue and tension among Freud's followers. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the author of 'When Elephants Weep' and 'Dogs Never Lie About Love,' plays a surprising (for me) and central role in the drama.

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Jan 12, 2011 Diana added it

I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis, for someone who is interested in Freud and history, it was juicy. Malcolm is very unique writer- finds aspects to an issue that has not been explored.

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May 04, 2012 Chris Schaeffer rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read this in one of my favorite cafes in Fishtown as something to get my mind off of work. Then, what do you know, Schreber pops up on page TWO. Oh well. What a delight anyway.

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Feb 17, 2013 AC rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: freud

Surprisingly (given the rather strange and narrow topic), a fascinating book -- not just on Freud, but on academic narcissism and on the psychology of heresy...

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May 30, 2010 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars

Not as strong as journalist and murderer, but useful for picturing how petty your analyst acts when you are not in the room

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Apr 16, 2010 Andru rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: essay

A fascinating portrait of some truly strange people and a strong defense of Freudian thinking and the value of psychoanalysis.

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Aug 26, 2008 Alexis rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: aspiring journalists

Recommended to Alexis by: Thad

What happens when a reporter tries to investigate the case of a defector from the intensely fraternal and self-protective society of analysts? A whole lot of lawsuits, that's what. An absolute delight, particularly if you know anything about psychoanalysis or linguistics. Purported to be a playing out of the Oedipal complex in modern times amongst Freud's followers, this story of jealousy and betrayal can capture anyone's attention. Malcolm herself got sued after her stories ran in The New Yorke...more

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Nov 12, 2011 Mark Baumer rated it 5 of 5 stars

Made me feel good. Compelling!

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Nov 21, 2011 Khristopher rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Khristopher by: David Samuels

Shelves: nonfiction-essay-reportage

Very much hangs on the hours and hours of interview tapes Malcolm received when interviewing the three main characters involved.

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May 04, 2009 Dan rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: for-real, y09, new-york

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jul 20, 2009 Liza rated it 5 of 5 stars

An incredibly story and character study and it reads like a thriller! I recently reread this, and, it made me want to read more by and about the charismatic and arrogant Masson and the other nutjob Swales (i've read much of their writing before, and it's fascinating). Janet Malcolm is a brilliant, dispassionate writer, who illuminates Freudian and post-Freudian theory so you don't have to read it yourself to understand these books.

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Apr 24, 2008 Andre rated it 4 of 5 stars

Juicy indeed. It is, however, asking the reader a lot to write a really long and supposedly supposedly suspenseful story about the craziest of the American Freudians--uh, how can you tell which one it is again? Therefore, I would approach this book more in the spirit of turning over a dead log in the woods and watching the creepy crawlies. For that, it is among the very best. Ever.

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May 31, 2010 Lobstergirl rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nyrb

I would read anything by Janet Malcolm. There's no one who does what she does better. I will read everything by Janet Malcolm, but I want to pace myself rather than burning through all of it and then being despondent for the rest of my life.

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Jul 22, 2011 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars

I am a sucker for these deep-in-the-weeds controversies/blood feuds and this one delivers. A fun way to catch up on my understanding of Freud.

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Nov 22, 2011 Moira rated it 4 of 5 stars

Janet Malcolm's cool, judicious eye is a weapon of mass destruction. Spectacular.

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Nov 02, 2007 Tamara rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone who wants to be stoned off words.

Layers upon layers. Greek tragedy, choral testimonies, analytic delving, psychological train wrecks. Soap opera of the intellect. This book blew my mind.

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Mar 26, 2007 kathryn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I never thought I could care so much about a psychoanalytic academic controversy. Janet Malcolm meticulously destroys a fraud. Amazing lit. journalism.

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Jan 20, 2008 G rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: high-caliber

A hilarious saga so outrageous that it could only be true.

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May 21, 2008 mike rated it 3 of 5 stars

fun stuff. Malcolm skewers her subjects.

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Nov 28, 2009 Jocelyn rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

I mean I learned some stuff.

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Aug 22, 2007 Rachel rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Freudians

Very funny book.

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