2. Jeffrey Masson: Freud, Seduction, and the New Puritanism

The intellectual and emotional distance separating Frank Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind (1979) from Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1984) is substantial. In Masson’s book the ambivalence and mutedness of Sulloway’s anti-Freudianism give way to consistent and strident hostility. Where Sulloway’s Freud is an example of hidden greatness marred by ambition, Masson’s Freud is one of failed greatness ruined by cowardice. Clearly, by the mid-1980s the anti-Freudian mood was growing more aggressive, and Jeffrey Masson had become its foremost spokesman.

Sulloway’s and Masson’s books also differ in scope. As we have seen, Sulloway aimed to write a full intellectual biography that would displace the traditional account of Freud’s development as a thinker. Masson’s ambition initially seems much more modest: he focuses on a single incident in Freud’s career, the abandonment of the seduction theory in September 1897. But, for Masson, the whole of Freud’s intellectual achievement was at stake in this decision. Indeed, Masson believes that the history not merely of psychoanalysis but of twentieth-century humanity was profoundly altered as a result of Freud’s change of heart. Thus the narrowing of focus as one moves from Sulloway to Masson is more apparent than real, especially when one bears in mind that Sulloway’s interpretation of Freud is itself limited to identifying the hidden Darwinian rationale of psychoanalysis. One could very well argue that both interpreters are guilty of subordinating Freud’s life work to a single preoccupation—in Masson’s case the seduction theory, in Sulloway’s the repressed sense of smell.

But there is a more important difference between the two. Masson’s attack came from within the psychoanalytic establishment and has resulted in a bruising battle of personalities, while Sulloway has remained very much the outsider whose book created nothing like the storm of controversy attending Masson’s apostasy. In the 1970s Masson, then a loyal Freudian, insinuated himself into the psychoanalytic hierarchy, befriending some of its most powerful figures and ultimately winning the sponsorship of Kurt Eissler, the director of the Freud Archives, the collection of materials on the history of psychoanalysis now housed in the Library of Congress. So impressed was Eissler with Masson that he chose him to be his successor and installed him in the provisional job of projects director, where Masson was put in charge of the publication of a complete edition of Freud’s correspondence with Fliess. But at a meeting of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society in June of 1981, Masson revealed surprisingly iconoclastic ideas about the seduction theory. The New York Times printed two articles reporting on that meeting, as well as a subsequent interview with Masson, after which Eissler felt compelled to fire him. Then, even before the appearance of The Assault on Truth, Masson was catapulted to a new level of notoriety by Janet Malcolm’s two long articles about him in The New Yorker, which appeared in 1983 and were later issued in book form as In the Freud Archives. Virtually everybody who read the Malcolm articles remembers them less for their careful account of Masson’s views on the seduction theory than for their portrait of an intellectual opportunist and philanderer, who boasted of having slept with nearly a thousand women. Masson sued Malcolm, and the case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, suggesting that Jeffrey Masson may well be remembered more as a figure in the history of American libel law than as a critic of psychoanalysis. In Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (1990) he has written his own version of his rude expulsion from the Freudian empyrean—an account that sheds interesting light on the view of Freud he expounds in The Assault on Truth. Meanwhile, Frank Sulloway spent the tumultuous years in which Masson was becoming a celebrity and the subject of much psychoanalytic tooth-gnashing rather quietly as a historian of science (he is now a visiting scholar at MIT) and as the dignified recipient of a MacArthur grant.

This contrast between the contentious, highly visible Masson and the retiring, academic Sulloway is aptly reflected in the tone of their respective books. Actually, by ordinary standards, Sulloway himself is anything but modest. Freud, Biologist of the Mind is shamelessly self-regarding, both in its inflated intellectual claims and in the solipsism of its prose. But set beside the slash-and-burn, scorched-earth manner of Masson, Sulloway sounds decidedly pedantic. His sentences are overburdened and ornate, while Masson’s are direct, simple, and breezy. Above all, Masson writes in the charged language of moral indignation, his discussion of historical questions giving way easily and often to personal judgment and ad hominem attack. His idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, with Sulloway one never doubts that the real issue is one of intellectual history—of getting Freud’s story properly told. With Masson, by way of contrast, the reader is aware that just beneath the surface of historical debate lies a bitter and ongoing controversy within the psychoanalytic profession. Masson’s subject may be Freud himself, but the true object of his enmity is psychoanalysis in the 1980s. He attacks the root in order to kill the tree.

The Abandoned Seduction Theory

To appreciate the impact of The Assault on Truth, one must begin with a firm understanding of the place of the seduction theory in the history of Freud’s thought. More precisely, one must begin with an understanding of the place the seduction theory has come to occupy in the traditional story of Freud’s intellectual development. Without exaggeration, the abandonment of the seduction hypothesis figures as the central event in the discovery of psychoanalysis, both in Freud’s own account and in that of his biographers. Thus, in championing the seduction theory and questioning the validity of Freud’s reasons for rejecting it, Masson’s book undermines the received conception of Freud’s intellectual achievement, just as it casts doubt on his integrity.

For approximately four years during the mid-1890s, Freud believed that certain forms of mental illness, notably hysteria, originated in premature sexual traumas. His hysterical patients, he became convinced, had been subjected to sexual abuse—seduction—before puberty, and the repressed memory of those assaults was the cause of their illness. Typically (although not exclusively) Freud identified a parent, usually the father, as the author of these childhood assaults, just as a daughter was the characteristic victim. Freud first mentioned the seduction hypothesis in a letter to Fliess of May 30, 1893, and one can trace Freud’s rising confidence in the theory through the correspondence of the following years. On April 21, 1896, he presented his theory to the public in the form of a lecture, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” given before the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna. He published the lecture the following month. The theory was also articulated in two other scientific papers of 1896, “Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses” and “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence.”

But little more than a year later, on September 21, 1897, Freud wrote Fliess what has come to be regarded as the most important letter in the history of psychoanalysis. In it Freud announced that he had lost faith in his seduction hypothesis. As he put the matter himself, “I no longer believe in my neurotica”—his theory of the neuroses.^[1] Freud gave four reasons for his disbelief, of which the second was doubtless the weightiest:

The surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse—the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, with precisely the same conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable. The [incidence of] perversion would have to be immeasurably more frequent than the [resulting] hysteria because the illness, after all, occurs only where there has been an accumulation of events and there is a contributory factor that weakens the defense.^[2]

Freud didn’t confess his change of mind in print until eight years later, in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and then only in language that is surprisingly evasive. He eventually came to think that his patients’ accounts of seduction most often originated in fantasies, and that their root lay not in the perverse actions of adults but in the spontaneous sexual desires of children. In this fashion, the abandonment of the seduction theory promoted the emergence of the idea of infantile sexuality, and in particular the notion of the Oedipus complex—first mentioned in a letter to Fliess of October 15, 1897, less than a month after Freud announced his rejection of the seduction hypothesis. At the same time, the new role assigned to fantasy considerably enhanced the importance of the unconscious in Freud’s conception of psychic life. In other words, the two pillars of mature psychoanalytic theory—infantile sexuality and the unconscious—were, one might say, the intellectual beneficiaries of the change of view Freud announced in his September letter. Indeed, in later accounts of his intellectual development, Freud and his biographers were to maintain that if the error of the seduction theory had not been recognized, psychoanalysis would never have been born. Instead, Freud would have remained stuck in a mistaken environmental interpretation of psychological development and would have failed to grasp the role of indigenous desire and the unconscious in mental life.

In The Assault on Truth, however, Masson contends that Freud’s original view was correct and his abandonment of the seduction theory in error. How Masson knows this is far from clear. The most striking feature of his book is precisely the arguments he does not mount. Masson is much given to talking about documents, brandishing an unreconstructed positivism in an age when the linguistic turn has made such passions seem unfashionable, if not entirely without charm. But in fact he has uncovered no documentary evidence that would enable him to settle the empirical question. He does not, for example, have access to information about the cases of hysteria—“The Aetiology of Hysteria” mentions eighteen of them—that first formed the basis of Freud’s conviction and later became the source of his doubt. No clinical records or case notes have turned up. Moreover, even if such documents existed, one would be unable to penetrate beyond Freud’s conviction, at the time, that the stories he elicited from his patients were true, just as one cannot penetrate beyond his later conviction that many of them were false. The question, after all, is one of interpretation. Ultimately, Masson’s blithe assurance that the traumatic narratives are accurate depends on their inaccessibility: because they can never be shown to be false, Masson is free to assert their trustworthiness. Nor can he cite later studies establishing the correctness of Freud’s belief that hysteria is always caused by sexual abuse in childhood, because there are no such studies. The best he can do is invoke the opinions of Sandor Ferenczi (in 1932) and Robert Fliess (in 1974), who argued that childhood sexual traumas are more often a cause of mental illness than psychoanalysts have cared to recognize.

The real source of Masson’s persuasion lies in the political culture of the past decade, with its rising awareness of the abuse of children. Because we have grown increasingly conscious of sexual violence against children, Freud’s belief that his patients suffered such abuse, and that it dramatically shaped their lives, strikes Masson as entirely plausible. One senses that he would prefer to deflect attention from the specific etiological claim Freud advanced—that sexual seduction in childhood is the invariable cause of one particular form of mental illness, hysteria—to a more general assertion that childhood sexual abuse is both common and the source of emotional damage. At the same time, he perhaps feared that this more general proposition would have been easily absorbed by the psychoanalytic community, since, far from clinging obdurately to fantasy as the sole explanation for tales of seduction, any number of analysts have recently put greater emphasis on childhood sexual traumas and their psychic consequences. Masson’s hostility to psychoanalysis thus required a more decisive, a more dramatic, gesture. Hence his unqualified assertion that the seduction theory was absolutely correct and Freud’s abandonment of it utterly mistaken.

Yet even this assertion—although it might have elicited objections of the sort I have suggested about the lack of historical or clinical evidence—would never have resulted in the major controversy that The Assault on Truth unleashed. Credit for the book’s explosive impact goes not to the issue of seduction itself but rather to Masson’s contention about what motivated Freud to change his mind. Masson argues that Freud abandoned the seduction theory because he was a liar and a coward. Freud was a liar, according to Masson, because, even when he wrote the September 21 letter, at some level he still believed that his patients’ stories were true. He was a coward because the only consideration leading him to abandon the theory was his inability to bear the opposition it had provoked among his scientific contemporaries. Here we have a proposition perfectly calculated to cause scandal, especially when it is combined with repeated assertions that Freud’s spineless retreat from reality—his blaming of the child for the vices of the parent—established the pattern of psychoanalytic thought and practice right down to the present day.

Not surprisingly, Masson devotes much of his attention in The Assault on Truth to arguing the case for this spectacularly irreverent explanation of Freud’s change of heart. Yet even here one is immediately struck by what he does not do. In particular, he pays only passing attention to the reasons Freud gives in his September 21 letter for no longer believing the theory. Masson has just one thing to say about these reasons: they cannot be taken seriously because Freud had already raised, and rebutted, the same objections in his articles of 1896. Masson does not bother to demonstrate the identity of these two sets of objections, although such a demonstration would seem to be a minimum requirement for dismissing them as irrelevant. Nor does he seek to answer them. Most striking of all, he gives no ground for thinking that Freud himself did not really find these reasons persuasive. One would especially like to hear why we should not credit the genuineness of Freud’s conviction that, in view of the prevalence of hysteria, the traumatic etiology made sexual assaults on children much more common than seemed probable. The issue, be it noted, is not whether this reservation was justified, but whether Freud might legitimately have come to feel its weight. In effect, Masson implies that there could never be intellectually persuasive grounds for altering one’s opinion about childhood seduction. Because Freud had once believed his patients’ accounts, he must have been lying when he claimed to have changed his mind.

There is merit in Masson’s suggestion that the September 21, 1897, letter did not mark the end of Freud’s hopes for the seduction theory. In this regard Masson draws attention to two passages from subsequent letters to Fliess. Almost two months later, on December 12, 1897, Freud reported on a patient treated by Emma Eckstein. Eckstein had evidently obtained an account of a childhood seduction by the patient’s father: “My confidence in paternal etiology has risen greatly,” Freud writes. “Eckstein deliberately treated her patient in such a manner as not to give her the slightest hint of what would emerge from the unconscious and in the process obtained from her, among other things, the identical scenes with the father.”^[3] The phrase “paternal etiology” is Freud’s shorthand for his seduction hypothesis; the same locution occurs in a letter of April 28, 1897, where its meaning is unambiguous. In the present comment on Eckstein’s patient, Freud seems to be arguing against an imputation that the seduction stories were elicited by the analyst’s suggestion. Nonetheless, the statement that his “confidence” in the seduction theory has “risen greatly” shows that the renunciation letter of September 21, despite its categorical language (“I no longer believe in my neurotica”), did not mark a clean break with the hypothesis. But Masson overinterprets Freud’s briefly resurgent expectations, writing that “it was as though Freud were telling Fliess: I was too hasty, I believe I was right to think that seductions occur and can be remembered in analysis.”^[4]

In his next letter, dated December 22, 1897, Freud recounts another case in which a real childhood trauma occurs:

The intrinsic authenticity of infantile trauma is borne out by the following little incident which the patient claims to have observed as a three-year-old child. She goes into a dark room where her mother is carrying on and eavesdrops. She has good reason for identifying herself with this mother. The father belongs to the category of men who stab women, for whom bloody injuries are an erotic need. When she was two years old, he brutally deflowered her and infected her with his gonorrhea, as a consequence of which she became ill and her life was endangered by the loss of blood and vaginitis.^[5]

In contrast to his remark on Eckstein’s patient, Freud here makes no reference to the import of this case for his conviction about the “paternal etiology.” Moreover, even late in his career Freud continued to believe that a significant proportion of his patients’ accounts of childhood sexual abuse were genuine. Still, the proximity of this narrative to the Eckstein case mentioned some ten days earlier probably justifies seeing in it revived enthusiasm for the seduction hypothesis. Both passages imply a certain volatility in Freud’s thinking on the subject late in 1897. But they do not support the more radical proposition that he was dissembling when, in the famous renunciation letter of September 21, 1897, he told Fliess he no longer believed in the theory. We should hardly be surprised that Freud was reluctant to part with an idea from which, as he confessed, he had expected to win “eternal fame…, certain wealth, complete independence, travels, and lifting the children above the severe worries that robbed me of my youth.”^[6]

Like his contention that Freud’s patients were telling the truth about their childhood seductions, Masson’s accusation that Freud changed his mind because he couldn’t bear the disapproval of his medical colleagues floats in a kind of epistemological void. Masson can assert it without ever fearing that it might be disproved. After all, it alludes to an intrapsychic event—something invisible—against which countervailing evidence isn’t even imaginable. Instead, in order to lend the accusation an aura of plausibility, Masson attempts to clear a kind of historical space for it. In particular he draws attention to the hostile reception that greeted Freud’s lecture on “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” Writing to Fliess five days afterward, Freud reported:

A lecture on the etiology of hysteria at the psychiatric society was given an icy reception by the asses and a strange evaluation by Krafft-Ebing: “It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.” And this, after one has demonstrated to them the solution of a more-than-thousand-year-old problem, a caput Nili [source of the Nile]! They can go to hell, euphemistically expressed.^[7]

Masson’s conclusion that the hostility evoked by the lecture broke Freud’s spirit rests, above all, on a complaint registered in the next letter to Fliess: “I am as isolated as you would wish me to be. Word was given out to abandon me, for a void is forming all around me.”^[8] The presentation of the seduction hypothesis, in other words, resulted in Freud’s professional isolation, which he ultimately found unbearable and from which he sought to escape by sacrificing the theory. At the opposite end of the evidential tunnel, Masson notes that only after he had published his recantation (in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) was Freud able to gather about him a group of disciples and thus bring his intolerable isolation to an end.

What most astonishes in Masson’s presentation of this hypothesis is his failure to address the obvious objections. Perhaps first is the simple fact that less than two weeks after giving the lecture on “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” and after bemoaning his isolation, Freud resolved to publish the essay, almost as if to prove that he was not so easily cowed: “In defiance of my colleagues I wrote down in full for Paschkis [editor of the Wiener klinische Rundschau] my lecture on the etiology of hysteria. The first installment appears today.”^[9] This response is in keeping with everything we know about Freud’s character, as attested to by friend and foe alike: he positively reveled in opposition, and his mental toughness and tolerance for conflict were seemingly boundless. Opponents of psychoanalysis have often complained that he was immune to criticism, no matter how just. Masson’s image of him caving in to peer pressure on an issue where he felt truth was on his side makes no characterological sense.

The hypothesis is also beset by chronological problems, above all by the fact that Freud’s feeling of isolation predates the lecture of April 21, 1896. The Fliess correspondence and even the earlier letters to his wife give the impression that for years Freud positively cultivated his loneliness. In a typical complaint of March 16, 1896, he writes: “I am satisfied with my progress, but am contending with hostility and live in such isolation that one might imagine I had discovered the greatest truths.”^[10] In editing the Fliess correspondence, Masson tries to shape the evidence to fit his hypothesis by grouping the letters after the April 21, 1896, lecture under the rubric “Isolation from the Scientific Community.”^[11] But the abandonment of the seduction theory announced on September 21, 1897, cannot be meaningfully correlated with Freud’s feelings of isolation, which, while they may have reached a high point in the wake of his April 1896 lecture, pervaded the 1890s.

Masson’s own book supplies evidence that scholarly research on childhood sexual abuse did not necessarily constitute a bar to professional recognition in the nineteenth century. His second chapter argues that Freud may have been introduced to the seduction issue during his visit to Paris in 1885–86. There, Masson suggests, Freud probably became familiar with the views on child abuse of Ambroise Tardieu (1818–1879), Paul Bernard (1828–1886), and Paul Brouardel (1837–1906), all of whom wrote about sexual assaults on children. Freud attended Brouardel’s lectures at the Paris Morgue—Masson speculates that he may have observed Brouardel conduct autopsies on victims of child abuse—and he had the relevant publications of all three authorities in his library (although one cannot determine when he obtained them or, for that matter, whether he had read them, since none of them is annotated). If, as Masson argues, Freud was familiar with the work of these figures, he must also have known that their exploration of child abuse brought them not ignominy but renown. Masson himself notes that Tardieu was professor of legal medicine at the University of Paris, dean of the Faculty of Medicine, president of the Academy of Medicine in Paris, and, in the words of the Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales of 1885, “the most eminent representative of French legal medicine” (15). Bernard was professor of criminal law on the Faculty of Law in Lyon, while Brouardel succeeded to Tardieu’s chair in Paris and was known as the “Pontifex Maximus” (30) of French medicine. These rather inconvenient facts force Masson into arguing that Freud’s isolation was a strictly Viennese affair and, by implication, that he threw over the seduction theory to win back the good opinion of his local colleagues. It is a kind of perverse variation on the “Viennese” Freud that both Carl Schorske and William McGrath champion with such sophistication and delicacy. A more plausible reading would suggest that the opposition to the seduction theory, as registered by Freud’s colleagues in April of 1896, rested not, as Masson would have it, on some visceral inability to accept the reality of childhood sexual abuse but on a rational skepticism about the sweeping etiological generalization Freud had proposed, namely, that such abuse was the necessary and invariable cause of hysteria.

Surely, however, the most powerful objection to Masson’s thesis of moral cowardice is that Freud abandoned the seduction theory only to embrace an idea that was even more offensive to the prejudices of his culture, the theory of infantile sexuality. The new doctrine, far from being a gesture of reconciliation, transgressed the most cherished belief of nineteenth-century sexual ideology, the innocence of childhood. If Freud’s decision to abandon the seduction theory was guided by a wish to ingratiate himself once again with Vienna’s medical authorities, he chose a most unlikely way to achieve that end.

The extravagance, both intellectual and rhetorical, of Masson’s thesis invites reflection. What is the meaning of this interpretation, at once so irreverent, poorly supported, and improbable? Given all the possible ways to account for Freud’s decision to abandon the seduction theory, why has Masson gone out of his way to construct a hypothesis that reflects so adversely on Freud’s character? The obvious temptation is to believe that Masson wishes to discredit Freud and through him the entire psychoanalytic enterprise. This suspicion finds support in Masson’s own unhappy experience with analysis, recounted in Final Analysis. Moreover, as I have already suggested, The Assault on Truth doubtless mirrors the broadly felt hostility to Freud that has emerged in the past decade; it testifies to the sensibility of our time.

But more than simple anti-Freudianism is involved. Freud’s betrayal of the seduction theory exasperates Masson because it places Freud (and the profession he founded) on the wrong side of what has recently become a major issue in sexual politics: the abuse of women and children. Freud, Masson suggests, was ahead of his time: he had the insight to recognize a profound truth, as it were, prematurely. But he ruined his achievement because he lacked the fortitude to stick by his discovery when the rest of the world opposed it. Worse than this simple failure of nerve, Freud constructed an intellectual system that actually lent new and sophisticated support to the very abuses he had earlier denounced. The theory of infantile sexuality and the notion of unconscious fantasy did not simply divert attention from sexual abuse; they made children themselves responsible for the passions that the seduction theory had correctly located in adults. Thus, rather than alleviating mental illness, psychoanalysis has in fact contributed to the suffering of its patients by denying the reality of the terrible things that had been done to them and insisting that neurotics were ultimately to blame for their own unhappiness. Masson never tires of issuing this indictment, which seems to represent the ultimate source of his antipathy to Freud. He extracts a measure of revenge for Freud’s betrayal by attributing his action to the basest of motives.

Beneath the simple hostility to Freud and the indignation about sexual abuse, however, the intellectual historian is inclined to detect an even deeper current of dissatisfaction, one pertaining to the modern conception of the self. When Freud gave up the seduction theory and articulated his ideas about infantile sexuality and the unconscious, he made himself the foremost spokesman for a new way of thinking about the subject. He insisted that the self cannot be imagined as a passive seat of consciousness upon which the external world leaves its impressions. Rather, the self is implicated in its own destiny; it carries within itself secret desires and unknown capacities that profoundly affect its history. Above all, the modern self is a site of internal tension and conflict. This new conception made Freud the central figure in the emergence of the modernist sensibility in the early twentieth century. It is a conception that resonates widely and deeply in the work of his most important contemporaries, whether social theorists, imaginative writers, or artists.

Masson appears to be caught up in a kind of postmodern rejection of this modern self. Repeatedly, he urges us to a return to a conception of human relations in which children are both innocent and inert—never subjects, but always objects. Initiative and aggression are, for Masson, the exclusive property of adults, especially adult males. He seems not at all mystified by the question of how these passive children eventually become dangerously active grown-ups—precisely the mystery that Freud sought to explain with his ideas of infantile sexuality and unconscious motivation. Rather, Masson accepts this dichotomy as part of the order of things. Presumably because they are sexually mature (and physically powerful), adults are the natural repositories of all sexual action. Children figure in the psychosexual economy only as victims. Masson’s conception of the self is profoundly nostalgic. He seeks to return us to a sentimental intellectual dispensation that Freud did more than anyone else to undermine.

There is a similarity here between Masson and Sulloway, whose views of Freud are otherwise so unlike. Sulloway, too, sets little store by the intellectual accomplishment that actually accounts for Freud’s stature. Sulloway shunts the core psychoanalytic ideas to the margins in order to identify a secret Darwinian teaching as the authentic source of Freud’s greatness. For Masson those core psychoanalytic ideas are not inconsequential but malevolent, because they came between Freud and the discovery on which his greatness should have been founded. As Masson is wont to say, they mark not the birth of psychoanalysis but its death.

Masson’s resistance to Freud’s actual historical achievement—to his stature as the premier modernist—is expressed by way of a political fantasy. Masson constructs an imaginary scenario of what psychoanalysis might have become had Freud remained loyal to the seduction theory. Not surprisingly, this counterfactual history derives from the politics of the 1980s. In Final Analysis Masson writes:

I knew what I imagined psychoanalysis stood for: the breaking of taboos; fearless invasion into enemy territory, the enemy being ignorance; “speaking truth to power” as we had said in the sixties; abolition of denial; compassion for the suffering of others, especially for those who suffered in childhood; an uncompromising search for historical truth, no matter where this led; finding the hidden injuries of class, sexism, racism. Such was my understanding of the thrust behind Freud’s creation of a new discipline, a truth-seeking instrument.^[12]

In effect, Masson pictures Freud launching a political rather than an intellectual revolution—becoming the founding father not of modernism, with its richly ambivalent conception of the self, but of a crusade to abolish injustice, in particular to stamp out child abuse. In the introduction to A Dark Science, his collection of nineteenth-century psychiatric texts on female sexuality, Masson comments: “The changes that psychoanalysis introduced into society in general were far less fundamental than they would have been had Freud stood by his initial heretical and revolutionary hypothesis.”^[13] One might object that even during the years when he believed in the seduction theory, Freud showed no inclination to transform himself into a political activist; his hostility to the misbehavior of adults never threatened to explode the individual therapeutic framework within which he tried to undo the damage. But the point of a fantasy is to imagine the historically unimaginable. Thus Masson envisions Freud carrying out the agenda of the 1980s at the end of the nineteenth century, thereby saving humanity decades of needless misery. That modernism would have been sacrificed to this cause is a triviality, of concern only to intellectual historians.

Emma Eckstein

We have already met Emma Eckstein briefly in her role as the therapist who, in December 1897, revived Freud’s hopes for the “paternal etiology” by eliciting a story of childhood seduction from one of her patients. But Emma Eckstein has a much larger part to play in The Assault on Truth. More than a quarter of Masson’s text is devoted to Eckstein’s own experiences as a patient in the mid-1890s, and it would not be inaccurate to call her the book’s heroine. In this capacity she is assigned two closely related functions. First, in Freud’s response to Eckstein, Masson finds an exact structural parallel to the abandonment of the seduction theory, a kind of model for his fateful change of view. To be precise, Freud’s treatment of Eckstein exemplifies the same disgraceful pattern whereby fantasy displaced reality in his thinking. Second, Eckstein is herself made the victim of a childhood sexual assault, the reality of which Masson uses to rebuke Freud once again for his intellectual retreat. These two functions are permitted to intermingle, because Masson wishes to keep the seduction hypothesis in the reader’s mind even when the events he describes (as in the case of his structural parallel) appear to have nothing to do with seduction.

The saga of Emma Eckstein, as revealed in the Fliess correspondence, is spectacularly interesting. References to her were excised from the original edition of the letters, but Freud’s physician, Max Schur, was given access to the originals when he was preparing his biography of Freud, and in 1966 Schur published the deleted passages in an article. They tell a remarkable story of medical malfeasance on the part of Fliess, abetted by Freud, whose reaction to Eckstein’s misfortune is the main source of Masson’s structural parallel.

Emma Eckstein was one of Freud’s early analytic patients. Her exact problem cannot be determined, but she seems to have suffered from painful or irregular menstruation. In accordance with Fliess’s naso-genital theory, Freud and Fliess decided she needed an operation on her nose, and in February 1895 Fliess came from Berlin to Vienna to perform the surgery, removing her turbinate bone. Following the operation, however, Eckstein did not heal. Instead, she experienced “persistent swelling,” “purulent secretion,” and finally “a massive hemorrhage.”^[14] When her suffering continued, other doctors were summoned. Freud’s account (in a letter to Fliess dated March 8, 1895) of what then transpired makes for gripping reading:

I wrote you that the swelling and the hemorrhages would not stop, and that suddenly a fetid odor set in, and that there was an obstacle upon irrigation.…I arranged for Gersuny to be called in; he inserted a drainage tube, hoping that things would work out once discharge was reestablished; but otherwise he was rather reserved. Two days later I was awakened in the morning—profuse bleeding had started again, pain, and so on. Gersuny replied on the phone that he was unavailable till evening; so I asked Rosanes to meet me. He did so at noon. There still was moderate bleeding from the nose and mouth; the fetid odor was very bad. Rosanes cleaned the area surrounding the opening, removed some sticky blood clots, and suddenly pulled at something like a thread, kept on pulling. Before either of us had time to think, at least half a meter of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned white, her eyes bulged, and she had no pulse. Immediately thereafter, however, he again packed the cavity with fresh iodoform gauze and the hemorrhage stopped. It lasted about half a minute, but this was enough to make the poor creature, whom by then we had lying flat, unrecognizable. In the meantime—that is, afterward—something else happened. At the moment the foreign body came out and everything became clear to me—and I immediately afterward was confronted by the sight of the patient—I felt sick. After she had been packed, I fled to the next room, drank a bottle of water, and felt miserable. The brave Frau Doktor then brought me a small glass of cognac and I became myself again.

…She had not lost consciousness during the massive hemorrhage; when I returned to the room somewhat shaky, she greeted me with the condescending remark, “So this is the strong sex.”

I do not believe it was the blood that overwhelmed me—at that moment strong emotions were welling up in me. So we had done her an unjustice; she was not at all abnormal; rather, a piece of iodoform gauze had gotten torn off as you were removing it and stayed in for fourteen days, preventing healing; at the end it tore off and provoked the bleeding. That this mishap should have happened to you; how you will react to it when you hear about it; what others could make of it; how wrong I was to urge you to operate in a foreign city where you could not follow through on the case; how my intention to do my best for this poor girl was insidiously thwarted and resulted in endangering her life—all this came over me simultaneously.^[15]

Despite the removal of the gauze that was the immediate cause of the hemorrhages, Eckstein suffered three more episodes of nasal bleeding over the course of the next month. A year later, in April and May of 1896, Freud developed a psychological explanation for Eckstein’s persistent hemorrhaging. He concluded that it was hysterical in origin, “occasioned by longing,” in particular, longing for Freud himself.^[16] He gives the fullest version of his hypothesis in a letter of May 4, 1896:

As for Eckstein—I am taking notes on her history so that I can send it to you—so far I know only that she bled out of longing. She has always been a bleeder, when cutting herself and in similar circumstances; as a child she suffered from severe nosebleeds; during the years when she was not yet menstruating, she had headaches which were interpreted to her as malingering and which in truth had been generated by suggestion; for this reason she joyously welcomed her severe menstrual bleeding as proof that her illness was genuine, a proof that was also recognized as such by others. She described a scene from the age of fifteen, in which she suddenly began to bleed from the nose when she had the wish to be treated by a certain young doctor who was present (and who also appeared in the dream). When she saw how affected I was by her first hemorrhage while she was in the hands of Rosanes, she experienced this as the realization of an old wish to be loved in her illness, and in spite of the danger during the succeeding hours she felt happy as never before. Then, in the sanatorium, she became restless during the night because of an unconscious wish to entice me to go there; since I did not come during the night, she renewed the bleedings, as an unfailing means of rearousing my affection. She bled spontaneously three times and each bleeding lasted for four days, which must have some significance. She still owes me details and specific dates.^[17]

Max Schur interprets this entire episode in terms of the pathology of Freud’s relationship with Fliess. It reveals, according to Schur, the depth of Freud’s neurotic dependence on Fliess and his consequent need to go to any length to exonerate his friend. But, unlike Schur and Freud’s other biographers, Masson is not interested in Freud’s peculiar emotional ties to Fliess. Nor is he interested in Fliess’s intellectual influence on Freud, as is Sulloway. Masson chooses instead to construct a reading of the Eckstein episode in which every element is equated with a corresponding moment in the history of the seduction theory. Although the parallel between Eckstein’s story and the fate of the seduction theory is not always made explicit, there can be no doubt that it is the underlying source of Masson’s interest in her. The Eckstein case, Masson suggests, established an unhappy pattern in Freud’s intellectual history.

In this structural parallel, Fliess’s original operation assumes the position of a childhood seduction. It is, above all, a real event, an actual trauma, just as the seductions were real. What’s more, like a childhood seduction, it is an abnormal or perverse event, its perversity residing not in the victim but in the authority figures (the counterparts of the parents), Freud and Fliess. Indeed, it is doubly perverse: first, because it was undertaken on the basis of Fliess’s crackpot ideas, and second, because Fliess blundered by leaving half a meter of gauze in the wound.

Eckstein’s hemorrhaging in turn corresponds to the neurotic illness that, according to the seduction theory, results from childhood sexual abuse. The important thing about the hemorrhaging, given Masson’s parallel, is that it was actually caused by the operation, just as hysteria is caused by the real sexual abuse inflicted on children. This is true, Masson firmly implies, not merely of the bleeding that occurred in the immediate wake of Fliess’s operation and again when Rosanes removed the gauze, but also of the three hemorrhages during the following month.

Freud’s hypothesis, developed a year later, that Eckstein’s bleeding was hysterical—the result of an erotic attachment to Freud—corresponds to the abandonment of the seduction theory and the substitution of infantile sexual desire and fantasy as the sources of neurosis. Now Freud says that the patient’s illness originated in her own imagination—which, significantly, is erotically charged—rather than in a real traumatic event suffered at the hands of others. The patient/child’s fantasy has, in effect, replaced the doctors/parents’ perverse actions as the causal agent. To make the analogy perfect, however, Freud would have had to believe that not merely the three final hemorrhages but also the earlier ones (right after Fliess’s operation and at the time the gauze was removed) were products of unconscious desire. In this way, Eckstein’s original trauma could be made to disappear entirely, as did the childhood sexual assaults when Freud gave up the seduction theory. But Freud’s statement, in the May 4 letter, that “she bled spontaneously three times” clearly alludes only to the later episodes. Hence Masson must be satisfied with a weaker version of his parallel: the original operation has not been utterly abolished into fantasy, as were the childhood seductions, but it has “receded far into the background” (102) and “seems to have been completely forgotten” (103).

To round out the analogy, Masson assigns Fliess a role in the episode roughly akin to that of Freud’s Viennese colleagues, whom Freud supposedly tried to appease by relinquishing the seduction theory. Granted, Masson does not draw this parallel expressly, but its presence is strongly felt. In this view, Fliess becomes a powerful medical authority whose disapproval Freud could not tolerate and for whose sake Freud was prepared to deny the significance of real abuse—the bungled operation—in favor of a theory of imaginary erotic desires. This explains Masson’s lack of interest in the specific psychopathology of Freud’s emotional bond to Fliess and his tendency to see Fliess simply as a doctor, another of those colleagues whose ideas and judgment Freud overvalued. In other words, Masson stresses the symptomatic character of Freud’s deference to Fliess: the incident shows Freud spinelessly retreating from reality in order to ingratiate himself with a presumed medical expert.

No matter how one construes it, the Emma Eckstein episode makes Freud look bad. Indeed, one suspects that Masson dwells on it at such length at least in part because he is eager to display Freud’s shortcomings. But Masson’s explicit purpose remains to enlist the episode as evidence for his explanation of the decision to abandon the seduction theory. Unfortunately, the episode can provide only an analogy, and an imperfect one at that. While analogies may lend plausibility to an idea, their authority is always less than decisive. Masson seeks to give his analogy greater weight by introducing evidence concerning Emma Eckstein’s own childhood seduction. Freud, Masson argues, must have believed that Eckstein herself was a victim of childhood sexual abuse, because he diagnosed her as a hysteric at a time when he still subscribed to the seduction theory and hence believed that all cases of hysteria originated in childhood assaults. Beyond this purely inferential reason, Masson bases his claim on direct evidence of an actual assault in Eckstein’s childhood, though not the original (presumably parental) assault that he considers the ultimate source of her illness. This evidence comes from the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, which contains an account of a patient called “Emma” whom Masson says, plausibly, is none other than Emma Eckstein. The Emma of the Project suffers from a neurotic aversion to entering shops, which Freud traces to an early sexual experience:

Emma is subject at the present time to a compulsion of not being able to go into shops alone. As a reason for this, [she produced] a memory from the time when she was twelve years old (shortly after puberty). She went into a shop to buy something, saw the two shop-assistants (one of whom she can remember) laughing together, and ran away in some kind of affect of fright. In connection with this, she was led to recall that the two of them were laughing at her clothes and that one of them had pleased her sexually.…

Further investigation now revealed a second memory, which she denies having had in mind at the moment of Scene I.…On two occasions when she was a child of eight she had gone into a small shop to buy some sweets, and the shopkeeper had grabbed at her genitals through her clothes. In spite of the first experience she had gone there a second time; after the second time she stopped away. She now reproached herself for having gone there the second time, as though she had wanted in that way to provoke the assault. In fact a state of “oppressive bad conscience” is to be traced back to this experience.^[18]

In interpreting this account, Masson emphasizes that Freud considered Emma’s memory entirely reliable: it accurately recaptured a little girl’s abuse by an older man, an experience that subsequently gave rise to her neurotic symptom. Of course, the fact that Freud would attribute Emma’s compulsion about entering shops to a real childhood experience is neither surprising nor significant. After all, the Project for a Scientific Psychology was written in 1895: the seduction hypothesis was in the ascendant, and the Emma of the Project is just one of many hysterical patients whose analysis seemed to support Freud’s hypothesis. But Masson conveniently ignores the characteristic way in which Freud’s narrative implicates the patient in the origins of her own illness. In terms of the emergence of psychoanalysis, what is in fact most striking about the passage is not Freud’s view of the abuse itself but his focus on Emma’s return to the scene of the crime, as well as her sexual attraction to one of the shop assistants in the later episode. In other words, where Masson wants to find guilty adult males, Freud presents the much more ambivalent picture of a girl whose desires play into the hands of her abusers.

What difference does it make that the Emma whom the shopkeeper abused was apparently the same Emma whose surgical mistreatment by Fliess Freud sought to excuse with his diagnosis of hysterical longing? Logically speaking, there is no connection between the two. But Masson labors mightily to juxtapose them in such a fashion that they might lend substance to his thesis about the abandonment of the seduction theory. He tries to connect the two by arguing that once Freud had explained away Fliess’s bungled operation in terms of Emma’s hysterical longing, Freud was liberated to think that her story of childhood seduction was also imaginary: “If Emma Eckstein’s problems (her bleeding) had nothing to do with the real world (Fliess’s operation), then her earlier accounts of seduction could well be fantasies too” (99). This reasoning, however, appears more forcible than it actually is. It rests on the assumption that Freud’s conviction about the reality or unreality of Eckstein’s childhood seduction was uniquely decisive for the fate of the seduction theory—more decisive, that is, than his conviction about the seduction stories told to him by his many other patients. But there is no reason to think this was the case. The accident of Emma Eckstein being the subject of both stories creates the impression of a meaningful connection when in fact none exists. Recognizing perhaps that he has been unable to forge a persuasive link between the two Emma stories, or to use either one to prove that Freud gave up the seduction theory out of moral cowardice, Masson falls back in the end on a categorical assertion:

From 1894 through 1897, no subjects so preoccupied Freud as the reality of seduction and the fate of Emma Eckstein. The two topics seemed bound together. It is, in my opinion, no coincidence that once Freud had determined that Emma Eckstein’s hemorrhages were hysterical, the result of sexual fantasies, he was free to abandon the seduction hypothesis. (107)

Even if we grant Masson’s dubious promotion of Emma Eckstein into a major preoccupation, the case for her central role in the abandonment of the seduction theory is hopelessly contrived—an unstable compound of inference, hypothesis, analogy, and not a little sleight-of-hand. Ultimately, as far as the seduction theory is concerned, Eckstein is a red herring. She tells us a good deal about Freud’s unhealthy attachment to Fliess and his weakness for psychological speculation (and, as Max Schur has shown, she is also an important source for Freud’s famous specimen dream of Irma’s injection, the theme of which is medical incompetence). But, when it comes to understanding why, in 1897, Freud ceased to believe in his neurotica, Emma Eckstein is no more relevant than Freud’s other patients. The fact that Masson lavishes so much attention on her, expending such energy constructing what is finally a ramshackle argument for her significance, again makes one wonder about his motives. Above all, Emma Eckstein is for him a woman whom Freud and Fliess abused. She is thus the prototypical psychoanalytic victim. Through Masson’s reconstruction she is empowered to give voice to the mute sufferings of generations of women at the hands of men, notably male analysts. This symbolic function, rather than her putative role in the abandonment of the seduction theory, explains her dominant place in The Assault on Truth.

Sandor Ferenczi

If Emma Eckstein is the heroine of Masson’s book (and Freud its villain), then Sandor Ferenczi is its hero. The Assault on Truth ends with a long chapter on what Masson calls “The Strange Case of Ferenczi’s Last Paper.” Like the chapter on Eckstein, it attempts to lend credibility to Masson’s thesis about the seduction theory by way of an argument that is again entirely inferential. At the same time, Ferenczi becomes for Masson the central figure in his imaginary counterhistory of psychoanalysis, whose vicissitudes he traces from Freud in 1896, through Ferenczi in 1932, to his own presentation to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society in 1981. Ferenczi’s paper, delivered at the Wiesbaden Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, suggests what psychoanalysis might have become had it remained faithful to Freud’s original seduction theory.

The paper, “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child,” argues that real childhood seductions are more often the cause of neurosis than psychoanalysts were inclined to acknowledge. Naturally, Masson thinks Ferenczi was right in his judgment, not to mention brave in contesting the orthodox emphasis on fantasy. Masson’s subject, however, is not Ferenczi’s paper itself but Freud’s reaction to it. Masson tries to read in that reaction evidence that, even in 1932, Freud still felt ashamed about his craven abandonment of a theory he knew in his heart was correct. Ferenczi’s revival of the seduction hypothesis so threatened Freud, Masson argues, that Freud was driven to terminate their friendship. “Ferenczi’s tenacious insistence on the truth of what his patients told him would cost him the friendship of Freud and almost all of his colleagues and leave him in an isolation from which he never would emerge” (148). Only Freud’s guilty inability to accept the reality of seduction explains Freud’s “otherwise mysterious turning away from Ferenczi” (xviii).

As Peter Gay has observed, the contention that Ferenczi’s revival of the seduction theory cost him Freud’s friendship is “contradicted by the facts.”^[19] Throughout the final months of his life, as Ferenczi collapsed both mentally and physically (he died May 22, 1933), Freud continued to correspond with him and his wife, and the letters display great affection as well as distress at Ferenczi’s suffering. Whatever tension the Wiesbaden paper may have introduced into the relationship, it did not cause Freud to sever his ties with the man who for many years had been his favorite disciple.

Masson, then, exaggerates when he says that Freud punished Ferenczi for reviving the seduction theory by terminating their friendship. But perhaps his hypothesis can survive without this inflated claim. Freud certainly disapproved of Ferenczi’s paper, and Ferenczi’s final years did witness an undeniable alienation between the two men, if nothing so extreme as Masson suggests. But is there anything in Freud’s response to the paper to indicate that he actually felt threatened by it—that it touched a sore spot in his conscience?

The best evidence of Freud’s reaction comes from a letter written to his daughter Anna on September 3, 1932. Four days earlier, on August 30, Ferenzci had visited Freud, who, because of his cancer, did not attend the Wiesbaden congress. Freud appears to have been more startled by Ferenczi’s manner than by what he had to say: without so much as a greeting, Ferenczi began, “I want to read you my paper,” which he proceeded to do.^[20] In his letter to Anna, Freud says that he found the presentation “confused, obscure, artificial,” but he seems mainly concerned that the paper would harm Ferenczi’s reputation.^[21] The letter, in other words, suggests that Freud felt not threatened but saddened and somewhat embarrassed for Ferenczi. Masson does not cite this letter and appears to be unaware of it, but it can be squared with his interpretation only by arguing that, even in a pri vate communication to his daughter, Freud hypocritically misrepresented his true feelings. This verges dangerously on making Freud’s guilt a matter of raw assertion, against which no evidence can prevail. Like his cowardly collapse before his Viennese colleagues more than three decades earlier, it becomes an invisible, intrapsychic event, to which Masson alone has access. In reality, Freud’s disapproval of Ferenczi’s paper is easily explained by the simple fact that Freud considered it mistaken. The idea that he not only disliked it but also “feared” (153) it is purely suppositional.

Likewise, Masson’s characterization of Freud’s “turning away” from Ferenczi as “otherwise mysterious” is unjustified. The tension between Freud and Ferenczi had important sources beyond the matter of seduction. Freud was much troubled by Ferenczi’s deviations from classical analytic technique and his introduction of a more active form of therapy. In an effort to break with what he considered the ineffective and authoritarian conventions of traditional analysis, Ferenczi had ventured on what, to Freud, was a dangerous experiment in intimacy. Freud wrote him in late 1931: “You have not made a secret of the fact that you kiss your patients and let them kiss you.” More ambitious therapists, Freud warned, would feel invited to proceed even further:

Picture what will be the result of publishing your technique. There is no revolutionary who is not driven out of the field by a still more radical one. A number of independent thinkers in matters of technique will say to themselves: why stop at a kiss? Certainly one gets further when one adopts “pawing” as well, which after all doesn’t make a baby. And then bolder ones will come along who will go further to peeping and showing—and soon we shall have accepted in the technique of analysis the whole repertoire of demiviergerie and petting parties, resulting in an enormous increase of interest in psychoanalysis among both analysts and patients. The new adherent, however, will easily claim too much of this interest for himself, the younger of our colleagues will find it hard to stop at the point they originally intended, and God the Father Ferenczi gazing at the lively scene he has created will perhaps say to himself: maybe after all I should have halted in my technique of motherly affection before the kiss.^[22]

Behind the issue of the kiss stands the fact that Freud and Ferenczi had come to occupy opposite ends of the therapeutic spectrum within psychoanalysis. Freud’s expectations for therapy were always modest. At best, he said, analysis aimed at “transforming…hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”^[23] Ferenczi permitted himself to hope for more. “The need to cure and to help had become paramount in him,” Freud wrote in his obituary notice for Ferenczi; “he had probably set himself aims which, with our therapeutic means, are altogether out of reach to-day.”^[24] Such passages afford strong reason to believe that Freud’s concern over Ferenczi’s approach to therapy and its implications for Ferenczi’s state of mind was a paramount factor in Freud’s withdrawal from his beloved associate. At the very least, the existence of this ongoing therapeutic disagreement considerably weakens Masson’s claim that the tension between Freud and Ferenczi derived wholly, or even largely, from the seduction issue.

Because Masson’s attempt to use Ferenczi to substantiate Freud’s dishonorable motives in giving up the seduction theory is such a lame affair—feebler even than his earlier effort to enlist Emma Eckstein in the cause—one again suspects that Masson’s real interest in Ferenczi lies elsewhere. Ferenczi, I would suggest, occupies a significant place in Masson’s fantasy about what should have become of psychoanalysis. Contemplating Ferenczi delivering his paper in Wiesbaden, Masson slips easily into the “as-if” language of the imaginary:

Perhaps never before had anyone spoken for the abused child with such sympathy and eloquence. The ideas Freud had propounded to a skeptical medical world in his 1896 papers were here repeated, but expanded through the knowledge gained by analysis in the years after 1896. It is as if Ferenczi were demonstrating to the analytic world how psychoanalysis could have developed had Freud not abandoned the seduction hypothesis. (150)

In effect, Masson pictures Ferenczi’s paper as a kind of reenactment of Freud’s own paper on “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” This time, however, Ferenczi corrects Freud’s error by steadfastly refusing to capitulate before a hostile audience:

It was as if Ferenczi were telling Freud: “You lacked the courage to stay with the truth and defend it. The movement that grew up around you is a product of this cowardice. I will not be a part of it. I will not break faith with what I know to be true.” And that is what happened; Ferenczi died, but he did not recant. (186)

Had psychoanalysis followed Ferenczi’s lead in 1932, the result, Masson believes, would have been a therapeutic revolution: analysts would have stopped denying their patients’ sufferings and confirmed the reality of the abuse to which those patients had been subjected. Sympathy, belief, and affection would have replaced the constipated insistence on emotional restraint and skepticism. Analytic therapy would have developed something of the loving, democratic character (although not the sexual intimacy) of Ferenczi’s “mutual analysis,” whose attractions Masson was to celebrate later in Against Therapy (1988).

But beyond this therapeutic transformation Masson also imagines Ferenczi inspiring a renaissance of the political campaign against sexual abuse that Masson so wanted Freud to launch at the end of the nineteenth century. Revealingly, Masson’s fateful presentation of his ideas about the seduction theory before a group of critical analysts in New Haven in 1981 again reenacts the original scenario. Masson was then the same age as Freud was when he gave his paper on “The Aetiology of Hysteria” to the Viennese Society for Psychiatry and Neurology. Masson’s account, in Final Analysis, of his own reception by those in attendance strongly echoes his account, in The Assault on Truth, of Freud’s brutal treatment at the hands of his Viennese medical colleagues in 1896. As he did with Freud, Masson stresses the “deathly silence” that followed his talk, as well as his sense of being “completely isolated” afterward.^[25] (Masson also portrayed Ferenczi, we will recall, as condemned to “an isolation from which he never would emerge.”) Like Ferenczi in 1932, Masson in 1981 both repeats and corrects Freud’s original gesture: he tells his colleagues the truth about childhood sexual abuse, and he refuses to recant. Moreover, in contrast to the ailing Ferenczi, Masson lives on to repudiate psychoanalysis entirely and become the public crusader against child abuse that Freud should have (and Ferenczi might have) been. In effect, Masson constructs an imaginary political narrative for Freud and then seeks to realize it in his own life. The sequence of embattled lecturers—1896, 1932, 1981—suggests a profound identification not only with Ferenczi but, surprisingly, with Freud himself. Thus, like Emma Eckstein, Ferenczi is first and foremost a symbolic figure for Masson: just as Eckstein is the prototypical psychoanalytic victim, so Ferenczi embodies the liberating ideological promise of Freud’s original insight. This explains his place of honor at the end of Masson’s book.

Against Therapy

Masson published Against Therapy in 1988, four years after The Assault on Truth. In the later book, which is decidedly more radical than its predecessor, the target of Masson’s criticism broadens from Freud and psychoanalysis to the entire psychiatric profession. The book consists of a series of case studies, all of which, Masson argues, reveal the fundamental abusiveness of psychotherapy. His examples range from Ludwig Binswanger’s Sanitarium Bellevue at the end of the nineteenth century to the American therapist John Rosen, who was forced to surrender his medical license in 1983 after patients accused him of kidnapping and torturing them. Many of Masson’s cases offer extreme instances of violence committed by doctors against their patients, and he confidently states that such abuse is not unusual. But his more important point is that grossly abusive therapies are structurally identical to seemingly humane ones and thus ought not to be considered anomalous. They simply make more palpably horrifying what goes on in every therapeutic situation.

Once Masson had come to grief in the psychoanalytic community by publishing his heretical views on the seduction theory, he seems to have felt liberated to embrace a position fully consistent with the implications of his critique of Freud. In Against Therapy he argues that any kind of psychotherapy, no matter how apparently enlightened or sophisticated, is indefensible. Psychotherapy, Masson charges, claims to help people when its real purpose is to make them conform; it is a vehicle of social control. At the same time Masson criticizes psychotherapy on what might be called epistemological grounds: it rests on an illegitimate pretension to psychological expertise—on a false belief that the so-called professionals have a better understanding of the “patient” than does the individual seeking treatment. Masson’s own experience as an analyst, he says, persuaded him that the therapist has no such superior insight, any more than he enjoys superior psychic health:

Many times I sat behind a patient in analysis and became acutely and painfully aware of my inability to help. Many times, indeed, I did feel compassion. But at times I also felt bored, uninterested, irritated, helpless, confused, ignorant, and lost. At times I could offer no genuine assistance, yet rarely did I acknowledge this to the patient. My life was in no better shape than that of my patients. Any advice I might have had to offer would be no better than that of a well-informed friend (and considerably more expensive).^[26]

Over and over again Masson returns to the impossibility of knowing a person better than the person knows himself. The individual is always the best judge of his own reality. Psychotherapists falsely pretend to a degree of intellectual intimacy that cannot be achieved even by friends or lovers.

With complete consistency, Masson asserts that the supposed object of psychotherapy—the ailment that justifies its existence—doesn’t properly exist. “There is no such medical entity as mental illness,” he writes.^[27] He does not deny that people experience great suffering and emotional pain, but he argues repeatedly that mental illness is simply a label those in power attach to unpopular opinions or unconventional ways of living. It represents an illegitimate translation into psychological terms of what is at bottom a political matter. Society finds various ideas and actions threatening, and it seeks to repress them by calling them insane. “Mental illness” is thus an ideologically loaded label for a difference in worldview. In the end, psychotherapy amounts to nothing more than the attempt to break a person’s will.

With these opinions Masson joins the ranks of a well-established antipsychiatric tradition, whose foremost representatives are Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, and Michel Foucault. Masson acknowledges his affinities with Szasz and Laing, and Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (which analyzes the asylum as a mechanism of social control) appears in his bibliography, although not in his text. But while recognizing that his ideas are not unprecedented, Masson insists that he alone has pursued the antitherapeutic point of view to its logical conclusion: his predecessors hoped only to replace existing forms of therapy with better ones, while he regards the very idea of psychotherapy as misguided.

Seen from the perspective of The Assault on Truth, the most striking thing about Against Therapy is that it completes the earlier book’s implicit move from psychology to politics. In The Assault on Truth Masson constructed a fantasy of Freud’s evolution into a political activist and the transformation of psychoanalysis into a revolutionary movement. Now he openly attacks the political quietism of all forms of psychotherapy and their corrupt implication in the existing order. The immediate goal of Masson’s own politics is to abolish the profession of psychotherapy, which, he writes, “can and should be replaced by open and searching criticisms of the very foundations of our society.”^[28] And he readily identifies his campaign against psychotherapy with such other recent political causes as Andrea Dworkin’s and Catherine MacKinnon’s efforts to outlaw pornography and the ban on electroshock passed by Berkeley voters in 1982—despite the failure, Masson notes scornfully, of the local therapeutic community to support it publicly. Masson’s turn from psychology to politics brings to mind the analogous development among the neo-Freudians, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, criticized the perceived neglect of social factors in orthodox psychoanalysis. As was the case with the neo-Freudians, Masson’s progressive political views have been purchased at the cost of Freud’s grim psychological insights. Herbert Marcuse showed in his famous critique of neo-Freudianism in Eros and Civilization that Freud’s unsentimental insistence on the burdens of sexuality and aggression is, in the end, both more radical and more humane than the facile call for social reform.

Masson’s unqualified attack on psychotherapy takes him well beyond the bounds of my present concern with recent critics of psychoanalysis. For my purposes, the main interest of Against Therapy lies in its implication for Masson’s view of Freud and his thesis about the abandonment of the seduction theory. Most immediately, Masson’s denial of the reality of mental illness might seem to undermine his contention, in The Assault on Truth, that Freud’s seduction theory was correct. The whole point of the seduction theory, after all, was that childhood sexual abuse gave rise to neuroses. Indeed, Masson praised Freud as the first thinker in history to have recognized the profound psychological consequences of child abuse. But if hysteria, like all psychiatric diagnoses, is a fiction—a clinical label for ideas or behavior that society disapproves of rather than a genuine illness—then the seduction hypothesis no longer makes any sense. By the logic of Against Therapy, Masson himself would seem to have abandoned it.

Masson nowhere admits that he has become ensnarled in contradiction. I suspect his silence is less a matter of bad faith than evidence that, from the start, he understood the seduction theory very differently from Freud. When he wrote The Assault on Truth, he still spoke of Freud’s patients as hysterics, and he accepted Freud’s judgment that they were genuinely sick. But Masson was never especially interested in the specific etiolological proposition Freud advanced, namely, that childhood seductions resulted in one particular neurotic disorder, hysteria. Rather, he sought always to conflate this formulation with the more general idea that childhood sexual abuse had severe and deleterious psychological consequences. Four years later, in Against Therapy, Masson refuses to speak of sickness, and he blames Freud for so labeling his patients. But he still believes that childhood seductions cause great suffering, especially if therapists deny their reality. Apparently, when we say that something causes suffering or mental pain, we are not, in Masson’s view, pronouncing the sort of intrusive and presumptuous judgment on another person’s experience that he so objects to in psychotherapy. But the difference between these two exercises—the one authentic, legitimate, and humane; the other bogus, illicit, and repressive—needs to be more fully explained. Otherwise, the impression persists that Masson’s extreme antipsychiatric views in Against Therapy contradict his earlier defense of the seduction theory.

Only one chapter of Against Therapy deals with Freud. It presents a critical examination of the Dora analysis, which Masson considers the single most influential case in the history of psychiatry—and one that dramatically illustrates the wrongs of psychotherapy. For Freud Dora was a hysteric; he originally titled her case “Dream and Hysteria” (“Traum und Hysterie”). Masson, however, denies that Dora was actually ill. He ignores the various “presenting symptoms”—including a persistent cough, hoarseness, and loss of voice without organic cause—that Freud considered the evidence of her hysteria. Instead, Masson insists, Dora offers a clear-cut example of perfectly reasonable behavior that, because of his intellectual (and ultimately political) prejudices, Freud arbitrarily chose to call pathological.

In 1898, when she was fifteen, Dora was brought to Freud by her father. Alongside her physical symptoms and general sullenness, she had developed, according to her father, an irrational belief that his close friend Herr K. had made sexual advances toward her. Freud’s initial response to Dora was not at all what her father expected: Freud concluded that her account of Herr K.’s behavior was accurate, and he agreed with her that her father had in effect handed her over to Herr K. as the price for his own affair with Herr K.’s wife. Freud’s response to Dora also seems to surprise Masson, who, in The Assault on Truth, alleged that, having abandoned the seduction theory, Freud routinely attributed his patients’ stories to fantasy, thereby excusing the abusive actions of adults. In this instance, however, Freud initially took the side of reality against fantasy, and of the child against the parent.

But, Masson complains, Freud’s loyalty to Dora was short-lived, his original alliance with her soon giving way to opposition. Instead of accepting that she simply found Herr K.’s attentions unwelcome and was understandably angered by her father’s self-interested betrayal, Freud insisted that Dora’s hostility to Herr K. was unreasonable and her anger against her father excessive. Indeed, Freud regarded both her intense aversion and her anger as manifestations of her hysteria. After all, Freud reasoned, Herr K. was a prepossessing man still in his thirties: Dora should have been aroused, not disgusted, when he embraced and kissed her (at age fourteen), just as she should have been flattered by his serious romantic interest in her. Freud even suggested that the whole matter could have been satisfactorily resolved had Dora married Herr K., which would of course have freed Frau K. to marry Dora’s father.

Masson is far from being the only reader to find Freud’s response to Dora lacking in sensitivity—to put it mildly. Peter Gay, for example, is no less appalled by Freud’s interpretive aggression and self-righteousness: Gay considers it astonishing that Freud ever published the case. Masson thus easily gets a good deal of legitimate mileage out of Freud’s manifestly retrograde views on women and on the proper relations between the sexes. What Freud calls hysteria—namely, Dora’s failure to respond to Herr K. and, especially, her anger at her father—is, Masson insists, simply a pejorative label for attitudes and behavior that Freud disapproved of. It is a classic example of the way psychotherapy invidiously uses psychological categories to mask political prejudices.

I am not, of course, eager to defend Freud’s treatment of Dora, least of all his blithe recommendation of Herr K.’s attractions. The important feature of Freud’s analysis, however—and the point at which Masson’s disagreement with Freud is most intriguing—does not lie in Freud’s ideologically loaded disregard for Dora’s legitimate interests. Much more significant is Freud’s belief that her behavior cannot satisfactorily be explained solely by an appeal to her conscious perceptions and intentions. Characteristically, he insists on deeper, unconscious sources for her actions. Freud suggests, in particular, that Dora was unconsciously in love with Herr K. and very much desired a romantic relationship with him. Her unconscious attraction explains why she reacted so violently both to Herr K.’s sexual advances and to her father’s contention that she had merely fantasized them. There was in fact an element of fantasy involved in her situation: the advances were real enough, but they were not entirely unwelcome. Dora’s extreme disgust disguised feelings of self-reproach. She had, in effect, gotten what she could not admit she wanted.

Here we have the essential point of opposition between Freud and Masson. Once again, as with the seduction theory, it comes down to a disagreement about the self and what can be known about it. Freud articulates a modern conception of the self: it is divided, at odds with itself, ambivalent. It houses desires that are not always compatible with its conscious convictions, and Freud regards its self-representations with suspicion. For Masson, on the other hand, the self is fundamentally unified and reliable. There are no secret corners, no hidden recesses unavailable to consciousness, that might stand at odds with explicit ideas or beliefs. Thus, when Dora says she was disgusted by Herr K., that settles the matter. Likewise, when Dora insists she was angry with her father because he questioned her trustworthiness, no more needs to be said. Only outrageous presumption allows Freud to pretend to know something about Dora’s inner life that she herself denies. Masson’s Dora is a little philosophe, driven by a passion for the truth—just as Masson himself, so he tells us, was driven by his passion to discover the truth about the seduction theory. Dora is thus allowed none of the psychological ambiguity that Freud, as a modernist, imputes to her. Jacques Lacan has identified Dora’s unmodern sense of innocence with Hegel’s notion of the “beautiful soul.” Dora articulates the beautiful soul’s naive protest against what the world has done to it. But Freud responds: “Look at your own involvement in the disorder which you bemoan.”^[29] The modern self, in other words, is complicit in its own disarray, whereas Masson’s Dora, like the hysterical patients of the seduction theory, is an innocent.

Already in The Assault on Truth Masson showed little sympathy for the idea of the unconscious. He did not explicitly dismiss it, but he objected to Freud’s invoking unconscious fantasies to explain what were, in Masson’s view, perfectly straightforward recollections of past mistreatment. At the very least, the unconscious, like infantile sexuality, had grown superfluous to Masson’s understanding of human behavior. In Against Therapy, especially in his analysis of the Dora case, his rejection of the unconscious becomes fully transparent. Even if one were to grant that a person might be unaware of certain impulses, those impulses, Masson argues, would be even less accessible to the therapist than they are to the patient. For all practical purposes, therefore, the unconscious simply doesn’t exist. Dora’s experience in analysis shows that the appeal to the unconscious is gratuitous as well as repressive: when she identified the conspiracy between Herr K. and her father, a conspiracy that Freud, as one of the boys, sought to abet, she had successfully got to the bottom of the problem. Everything else—all of Freud’s supposedly expert opinions—was mere presumption. Far from easing his patient’s misery, Freud added to it.

What Freud should have done, according to Masson, is not analyzed Dora—which was unnecessary and abusive—but taken her side in the controversy. Because the issue was essentially political, it called for a political response: a denunciation of male sexual exploitation and hypocrisy. But the burden of the correct political response had, in the end, to be borne by Dora alone. When Freud continued to insist that she was unconsciously in love with Herr K., she walked out on Freud. She later confronted Herr K. and his wife and obtained confessions from them, an action that Masson applauds as “a political statement of remarkable maturity.”^[30] Dora, in his view, was not a hysteric but an emerging feminist.

Masson makes no effort to bring the Dora case into line with the seduction hypothesis. In The Assault on Truth Masson assumed, in keeping with the seduction theory, that whenever Freud identified a patient as a hysteric, the patient had been sexually abused as a child. But Masson advances no such claim about Dora. On the contrary, he suggests that, by finally publishing her case (in 1905), Freud intended to send a muted signal to his professional colleagues that he had given up his heretical views about seduction. Nor does Masson try to establish a structural parallel between the Dora case and the seduction model, as he did with Emma Eckstein’s operation and Freud’s diagnosis of hysterical longing—presumably because Freud’s acknowledgment that Dora was the object of a genuine seduction by Herr K. effectively rules out any such structural argument. But, more fundamentally, Masson’s newly acquired antitherapeutic bias and his denial of the reality of mental illness seem to have dimmed his enthusiasm for what was, after all, essentially a diagnostic theory linking childhood abuse with adult neurosis. Like it or not, the seduction theory belongs to the old psychiatric order, which Masson is out to discredit in Against Therapy. Thus, without explicitly rejecting the theory, he consigns it to a conceptual limbo.

Marianne Krüll and Marie Balmary

In 1979, five years before the appearance of The Assault on Truth and two years before Masson’s address to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society, two European scholars, working independently of one another, published books on Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory. The coincidence is in itself striking. But Marianne Krüll’s Freud und sein Vater and Marie Balmary’s L’Homme aux statues: Freud et la faute cachée du père share a good deal more than their interest in the fate of the seduction hypothesis. In particular, Krüll and Balmary agree with Masson that Freud’s decision to abandon the seduction theory in favor of the idea of infantile sexuality was a mistake, and one with grave consequences for the history of psychoanalysis at that. Like Masson, they see the decision as marking a retreat from reality to fantasy—from a view of human development in which experiences with other people, above all family members, are the chief influences on a child to one in which the self is a creation strictly of internal needs and desires. Both lament Freud’s selective reading of the Oedipus legend, from which he suppressed the origins of the tragedy in the sins of Oedipus’s father, Laius—notably Laius’s attempt to murder his son—in order to focus on the purely intrapsychic drama, Oedipus’s love of his mother and hatred of his father. The Oedipus complex, they protest, made the child the source of its own misery, thereby exonerating the parents.

Krüll and Balmary, again like Masson, aim above all to provide an explanation for Freud’s fateful decision to give up the seduction hypothesis. In contrast to Masson, however, they look for that explanation not in Freud’s professional concerns of the 1890s but in his personal life, especially his relationship with his father. In this respect their studies are profoundly Freudian. Both adhere to the psychoanalytic doctrine that the crucial developments of adult life are shaped in childhood, and both reconstruct Freud’s childhood experiences by means of a psychoanalytic interpretation of his dreams, associations, remarks, and quirks of character. This shared commitment to the intellectual methods of psychoanalysis sharply distinguishes them from Masson. Their criticisms of Freud are pointed and often irreverent, but they nonetheless write from the perspective of the loyal opposition. Krüll in particular takes a dim view of Masson’s work. In the foreword to the American edition of Freud and His Father, published in 1986, she writes: “Since Masson knew my book, I find it surprising that he neglected to mention alternative explanations for Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory, no doubt the better to press his—to my mind—quite absurd idea that Freud was little more than a liar craving fame.”^[31] In effect, Krüll’s and Balmary’s books show that one can disagree with Freud on the issue of seduction without throwing over the whole of his intellectual system.

Given the speculative nature of their reconstructions, it is not surprising that Krüll and Balmary come up with very different versions of Freud’s childhood and equally different accounts of the psychodynamic factors at work in his change of heart about seduction. Krüll bases her argument on a close analysis of the reasons Freud gives for abandoning the seduction theory in his letter to Fliess of September 21, 1897. Only one of those reasons, she says, is persuasive, and it is entirely personal, as opposed to clinical or logical. This is Freud’s conclusion that if the seduction theory were correct, then “in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse.”^[32] Had he retained the theory, Krüll argues, “Freud would have had to assume that even his own father was a seducer and so ‘perverse.’ ”^[33] Unable to face such an unsavory prospect, Freud developed the Oedipus theory—in which all “perversions” become autonomous creations of the infantile imagination—to avoid confronting his father’s misdeeds. According to Krüll, Freud’s reluctance to accuse his father stemmed less from filial piety than from an unspoken taboo, passed on to him in early childhood, that forbade him from delving into Jacob Freud’s past. She deduces the existence of this taboo from a dream Freud had on the night of his father’s funeral, October 25, 1896. In it Freud saw a sign reading, “You are requested to close the eyes,” which Freud himself interpreted as a reproach for having economized on funeral expenses and for arriving late at the ceremonies, but which Krüll believes alludes to a childhood injunction that Freud “avert his eyes” from his father’s sins. The bulk of her book consists of an effort to establish just what those sins were and how they influenced Sigmund Freud’s development.

The reader of Krüll’s book fully expects her historical reconstruction to culminate in the revelation that Jacob Freud had seduced his own children. After all, it was the intolerable prospect of his father’s guilt in this regard, according to Krüll’s hypothesis, that had caused Freud to give up the seduction theory in September 1897: the theory, if true, incriminated “the father, not excluding my own.” The expectation is heightened by evidence from the Fliess letters that Freud himself had entertained this very possibility. On February 11, 1897, he wrote Fliess: “Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother (all of whose symptoms are identifications) and those of several younger sisters.”^[34] Krüll published her book before the appearance of the complete Fliess correspondence, and thus she knew this remarkable passage only in the bowdlerized version of Ernest Jones, who summarizes: “[Freud] inferred, from the existence of some hysterical symptoms in his brother and several sisters (not himself: nota bene), that even his own father had to be thus incriminated.”^[35] Krüll, in other words, was unaware that Freud had actually called his father a pervert, the same label he used in the crucial passage about fathers (including his own) in the famous renunciation letter of September 21, 1897. Still, one is surprised that she makes so little of Freud’s express indictment of his father (she cites the sentence from Jones, but without comment), because the passage seems almost tailor-made for her thesis. But while she accuses Jacob Freud of many failings, large and small, she never says that he abused his children sexually. Of course, Freud’s seemingly dispassionate contemplation of his father’s misbehavior—in a letter written not all that long after Jacob Freud’s death and the dream enjoining Freud to avert his eyes—undermines Krüll’s conclusion that, seven months later, Freud gave up the seduction theory precisely in order to protect his father from the charge of being a seducer and a pervert.

If Jacob Freud was not guilty of actual seduction, what, then, were the paternal misdeeds from which Sigmund Freud was to avert his eyes? Most of them, it seems, had to do with masturbation. Krüll concludes, not unreasonably, that Jacob Freud threatened young Sigmund with castration for masturbating. More spectacularly, she surmises that at age three, when the family moved from Freiberg in Moravia to Leipzig, Freud may actually have seen his father masturbating during the train journey. She also believes that Jacob Freud committed adultery (he was, after all, a traveling salesman) and that he bore a burden of guilt for abandoning the orthodox Judaism of his family. Taken together, these trespasses constitute the paternal heritage that Freud was prohibited from exploring, a prohibition he honored when he gave up the seduction theory and ceased attributing the unhappiness of children to the misbehavior of adults.

In Krüll’s analysis, the paternal taboo is extended from the sins of Freud’s father to include those of other “primary caretakers” and significant figures in young Sigmund’s world. Long stretches of her book are given over to equally speculative constructions of the various misdeeds of Freud’s half brother Philipp, his nephew John, and his nursemaid, Resi Wittek. In effect, she overloads Freud’s childhood with catastrophes, thereby diffusing the notion that a single traumatic event, like a parental seduction, might have dramatically shaped his character. In Krüll’s hands the seduction theory becomes a kind of intellectual catchall for a wide range of childhood experiences in which parents or other members of the household exert some significant influence on a child’s development. In Freud’s own case, most of those experiences had a sexual cast, but none of them even remotely resembled the sort of abusive assault that Freud seems to have had in mind when he formulated his theory. In fact, Krüll’s main objection to the seduction theory is its exclusively sexual focus. Accordingly, she suggests that instead of abandoning the theory, Freud should have broadened and desexualized it to incorporate the full spectrum of acts through which parents deceive and misguide their children:

In my view, Freud had developed a true psychoanalytical theory with his seduction theory—all that he needed to do was to rid it of its extreme fixation on sexual seduction. Freud could easily have expanded his seduction theory into a “misguidance” theory: the child is misguided by his or her parents or primary caretakers and hence develops neurotic aberrations.^[36]

Krüll’s reading of the seduction theory thus has an ideological valence radically different from Masson’s. Masson of course stresses precisely the opposite—the sexual content of the theory—as it becomes for him an early manifesto in the campaign against the sexual abuse of children. Perhaps because she was writing in the 1970s, Krüll seems largely unconcerned with this issue, and her book is innocent of the feminist ethos that informs Masson’s Assault on Truth. Instead, as a professional sociologist, she champions the seduction theory because it properly acknowledges the influence of the family on the developing child, an influence that psychoanalysis has neglected in its preoccupation with the child’s own desires and imaginings. Krüll agrees with Masson only in regretting that Freud relinquished the actual world of interpersonal relations in favor of a purely psychological conception of the child’s reality.

The argument of Marie Balmary’s Psychoanalyzing Psychoanalysis: Freud and the Hidden Fault of the Father is structurally identical to that of Krüll’s Freud and His Father. According to Balmary, when Freud rejected the seduction theory in favor of the Oedipus theory, he mistakenly substituted a purely intrapsychic phantasm (derived from his self-analysis) for the real experiences that his patients had revealed in their accounts of seduction. Moreover, he abandoned the seduction theory and developed his truncated conception of the Oedipus complex, in which the crimes of Laius are expunged, in order to hide the transgressions of his own father. Balmary conducts her argument in a manner best described as an exaggerated variation on Krüll’s psychoanalytic method. She takes even greater interpretive license with Freud’s dreams and personal manias in constructing a version of his childhood adequate to explain why he felt compelled to deny his father’s misdeeds. Balmary is a student of Jacques Lacan’s, and her work has been influenced as well by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gauttari’s Anti-Oedipus, which also sees psychoanalysis going astray with the “discovery” of the Oedipus complex. Her book is written in the gnomic style favored by Lacan and other recent French philosophers and literary theorists. It is something of a jeu d’esprit, and its allusive manner contrasts strikingly with the Teutonic thoroughness of Krüll’s book.

Where Krüll focuses on masturbation—both Freud’s own and his father’s—Balmary invents a decidedly more shocking story. She argues that Jacob Freud’s hidden fault was to have driven his second wife, Rebekka, to commit suicide, perhaps by jumping from a train. Jacob murdered Rebekka because he had fallen in love with Freud’s mother, Amalie Nathansohn, who, Balmary surmises, was already pregnant with young Sigmund when the couple married on July 29, 1855 (a hypothesis based on the dubious assumption that Freud’s birthdate was March 6 rather than May 6, 1856). In effect, Jacob’s fault consisted of a typically Freudian confection of sex and violence, but located now in the real world of adult relationships, rather than in the overwrought imagination of the child. Balmary’s construction rather resembles Freud’s own notion of the primal crime, in which the passions of the Oedipus complex are acted out in a highly dramatic fashion by sons who actually murder their father in order to take possession of their mother and sisters.

Balmary faces an uphill battle. Her problems begin with the embarrassment that absolutely nothing is known about Rebekka, who may in fact never have existed. Neither Freud nor any members of the family ever mention her. The supposition of her marriage to Jacob Freud rests on fragile documentary evidence: a contradictory reference in a register of Jews living in Freiberg and a deleted listing in a passport register, which Marianne Krüll argues should lead one to speak more accurately of an “alleged” marriage.^[37] But Balmary is nothing if not resourceful. She gathers an eclectic garland of Freud’s idiosyncrasies, which, when subjected to her fierce analytic scrutiny, reveal his unconscious knowledge of Rebekka’s fate. Those idiosyncrasies range from his partiality for Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Michelangelo’s Moses, to his appetite for mushrooms, which he hunted with his children during summer holidays, to his collection of antiquities, from which he sometimes brought newly acquired statues to the dinner table. In each of these preoccupations Balmary finds evidence that Freud identified his father with Don Juan, a seducer and a murderer. Thus, for example, Freud’s statues were in reality symbols of the Stone Guest—the murdered Commander—whom Don Juan invites to dinner and who ultimately wreaks vengeance on him. Freud collected the statues (and “invited” them to dinner) because he unconsciously feared that the same fate awaited his Don Juan father. Michelangelo’s Moses likewise embodies the Don’s avenger, and Freud’s obsession with this statue (which he visited repeatedly in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli) again points to his unconscious fixation on the murdered Rebekka. Similarly, his beloved mushrooms, as analyzed by Balmary, turn out to be little statues produced by nature, and thus Freud’s otherwise inexplicable devotion to them yields up its hidden biographical meaning. Even more so than Krüll, Balmary displays the indulgent intellectual habits of the psychoanalytic style—what Frederick Crews disapprovingly calls “the Freudian way of knowledge.”^[38]

The link between Freud’s unconscious awareness of his father’s crime and the abandonment of the seduction theory is, by comparison, fairly straightforward. The seduction theory pinned the blame on fathers—Balmary calls it “the theory of the father’s fault”^[39]—and, in replacing it with the Oedipus theory, Freud sought to expiate his father’s sin by taking the burden of guilt on himself. The new theory denied the criminality of fathers, locating both illicit desire and murder in the imagination of the child. Thus Freud’s abandonment of the seduction hypothesis becomes an act of filial piety. Balmary finds textual evidence for this biographical interpretation in an anecdote included in Freud’s famous letter of September 21, 1897, announcing his abandonment of the seduction theory. There he identifies himself with the disappointed heroine of a Jewish joke, significantly named Rebecca: “A little story from my collection occurs to me: ‘Rebecca, take off your gown; you are no longer a bride.’ ”^[40] Freud’s sense of intellectual deflation apparently reminded him of a bride left standing at the altar. He had to take off the gown of “eternal fame,…certain wealth, [and] complete independence” that he had anticipated donning as a reward for his great discovery.^[41] For Balmary, however, the appearance of this mysterious Rebecca in Freud’s letter of renunciation points unmistakably to an unconscious tie between the abandoned seduction theory and Jacob’s murdered second wife, another Rebecca whose marriage had come to grief. “If Freud really knew nothing about Rebecca,” Balmary concludes, “we would think that her name would not appear as it does, through an association of ideas, at the very moment that Freud renounces revealing the fault of the fathers.”^[42]

Like Krüll, Balmary wants psychoanalysis to return to its original understanding of mental illness as a product of “the perverse conduct” of adults.^[43] Also like Krüll (and in contrast to Masson), she would modify the seduction hypothesis to remove its exclusive focus on sexual abuse. “The origin of neurosis is not sexual desire alone nor even sexual trauma alone, but all the faults committed by the very people who present the law to the child.”^[44] In Balmary’s analysis, we recall, Jacob’s sexual misconduct (his impregnation of Amalie) is subordinated to his murderous treatment of Rebekka. Balmary does not even insist that the essential crimes of parents be committed against children: Jacob’s victim, after all, was herself an adult. The father’s fault, in other words, may be an act to which the child is simply witness.

In light of the remarkable similarities between Krüll’s and Balmary’s views of the seduction theory and Masson’s argument in The Assault on Truth, one might wonder why Masson nowhere acknowledges either as a significant predecessor. Possibly he did not want to diminish his claim to originality. Or perhaps he was reluctant to associate himself with the extravagant psychoanalytic apparatus they both employ. But the deepest reason, I suspect, lies in the ideological gulf separating him from Krüll and Balmary. Both Europeans write from within an essentially patriarchal framework. The paradigmatic relationship of their analyses, as of Freud’s own, remains the male dyad of father and son. Masson, on the other hand, wishes to emphasize the potential feminist logic of the seduction theory, transforming it into a story in which fathers characteristically abuse their daughters. Thus, from Masson’s perspective, Krüll’s and Balmary’s stress on the troubled relationship between Freud and his father must seem a reactionary diversion, serving only to deflect attention from the revolutionary implications of Freud’s original discovery.

The Seduction Theory as Historical Construct

The nearly simultaneous appearance of the books written by Masson, Krüll, and Balmary, with their common defense of the seduction hypothesis and their severe criticism of Freud for abandoning it, seems—to use one of Freud’s favorite terms—uncanny. It testifies to a renewed appreciation, over the past two decades, of the reality of child abuse and expresses exasperation that psychoanalysis has often functioned to deny that reality. Psychoanalysts, moreover, would appear to be increasingly receptive to the complaint that they have wrongly minimized the incidence and the psychological importance of childhood trauma. The analyst Leonard Shengold’s recent book, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, is a case in point. Ironically, Jeffrey Masson—very much persona non grata in the psychoanalytic world—may have played a role in bringing about this transformation.

My concern here is not, however, with contemporary psychoanalysis but with Freud. I have tried to show that Masson’s, Krüll’s, and Balmary’s explanations of his decision to abandon the seduction theory are all deeply flawed. But beyond the shortcomings of their individual arguments lurks a more general problem with the story of the seduction theory. This problem is exaggerated in their critical interpretations, but it also afflicts the traditional accounts of the theory and its abandonment, whether in Ernest Jones or in Freud’s own autobiographical pronouncements. Neither the critics nor the defenders acknowledge the extent to which the story of the seduction theory is a convenient historical construct—a kind of intellectual shorthand—used to describe developments that in reality were far messier, far less sharply etched, than the story makes them appear. As such a piece of shorthand, it is no more inaccurate than most historical narratives. Nevertheless, we need to recognize in the story of the seduction theory what Stephen Gill, in another context, calls a “retrospective patterning,”^[45] one that is altogether too confident and that stands in need of deconstruction. In the following, I hope to draw attention to the many ways in which Freud’s thinking about the neuroses in the 1890s corresponded only approximately to the conceptual straitjacket imposed by the seduction story.

To begin with, the seduction theory, especially as explicated by Masson, considerably simplifies Freud’s overall view of mental illness during those years. Contrary to what accounts of the theory often imply, Freud never believed that every neurosis originated in a childhood sexual trauma. Rather, he held that the neuroses fell into two broad categories, the psychoneuroses and the actual neuroses, and of these only the former could trace their source to seductions. The actual neuroses (“actual” in the French or German sense of “present-day”) were caused by a recent sexual disturbance, such as coitus interruptus or, more fundamentally, masturbation. Thus the seduction theory had to compete for Freud’s intellectual allegiance with what might be called the “masturbation theory.” Throughout the mid-1890s he was convinced that masturbation and its various derivatives were as important a cause of mental illness as was childhood sexual abuse. Interestingly, the masturbation theory also suffered eclipse in Freud’s later thinking, although it was never explicitly repudiated. Indeed, Freud might be accused of having suppressed the masturbation theory, just as he suppressed the seduction theory. If moralists of the 1980s had become as exercised about masturbation as they did about childhood sexual assault, one can even imagine his being attacked for abandoning his original insight into the consequences of self-abuse.

Only the psychoneuroses, then, originated in seductions. Moreover, Freud divided the psychoneuroses themselves into two principal groups, hysteria and obsessional neurosis, which in turn stood in a very different relation to their presumed source in childhood trauma. Hysteria alone fit the seduction model exactly: it was caused by a seduction that the child experienced as a “shock.”^[46] Obsessional neurosis, by contrast, was caused by a seduction that the child found not shocking but pleasurable. In fact, the obsessional symptom was a reflection of the self-reproach later felt by the patient precisely because the seduction had been enjoyed when it occurred. Freud’s image of childhood seduction was thus more complicated than Masson and others imply. Seduction was sometimes a purely negative experience, accompanied, Freud said, by “revulsion and fright.”^[47] In this case it resulted in hysteria. But it could also be gratifying, in which case it gave rise, under later moral pressure, to feelings of guilt that led ultimately to obsessional neurosis.

A second distortion pertains to Freud’s model of the seductions responsible for hysteria. As the seduction theory hardened into a historical construct, the victim of abuse was nearly always pictured as a daughter and the perpetrator as a father. Freud himself was increasingly inclined to speak as if he considered the father the archetypal seducer: apart from his two references to the “paternal etiology,” we have his conclusion, in the renunciation letter of September 21, 1897, that “in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse.” But Freud’s actual picture of childhood trauma was decidedly more complex. In “The Aetiology of Hysteria” he writes that six of his eighteen victims were boys—clearly not daughters. Moreover, the Fliess correspondence refers to a number of individual male victims, including, we will recall, Freud’s own brother. Freud classified his eighteen cases in terms of three kinds of childhood sexual stimulation. The first group involved “single, or at any rate isolated, instances of abuse, mostly practised on female children, by adults who were strangers.”^[48] The second, and more numerous, group involved cases “in which some adult looking after the child—a nursery maid or governess or tutor, or, unhappily all too often, a close relative—has initiated the child into sexual intercourse and has maintained a regular love relationship with it.”^[49] To be sure, Freud here disguised his conviction that the “close relative” was often the father, and he later rebuked himself for substituting an uncle for the father in two cases mentioned in Studies on Hysteria. But he nonetheless thought that seductions were also carried out by adults other than the father. For example, Freud believed he had himself been seduced by his nursemaid. “The old man plays no active part in my case,” he wrote Fliess; rather, his “ ‘prime originator’ was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman” whom his mother remembered as his nurse.^[50] Finally, in a significant portion of childhood seductions adults had no direct role at all. The third category of cases discussed in “The Aetiology of Hysteria” involved “child-relationships proper—sexual relations between two children of different sexes, mostly a brother and sister, which are often prolonged beyond puberty and which have the most far-reaching consequences for the pair.”^[51] (In his two other papers on the seduction theory, “Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses” and “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,” Freud mentions “blameless children” as the “assailants” in more than half the cases.)^[52] True, Freud believed that the boys who initiated their sisters had themselves been seduced by adult females; hysteria was thus ultimately traceable to the actions of grown-ups. But the crucial point is that his image of childhood seduction never conformed neatly to a model in which daughters are the victims and fathers the villains. Instead, it incorporated a wide spectrum of relationships, with children and seducers belonging to both sexes and with the active part taken not just by fathers but by other relatives, servants, or even children themselves. In Masson’s version of the seduction theory, both the theory’s gender construction and its generational pattern have been streamlined to suit an ideological agenda.

A similar streamlining can be observed in the treatment of Freud’s thinking about the role of fantasy in the origin of the neuroses. The usual accounts of the seduction theory and its abandonment create a false dichotomy between real experiences on the one hand and purely imagined ones on the other. Thus, during the years in which he held to the seduction theory, Freud is said to have located the origin of hysteria in actual historical incidents of abuse; after he abandoned the theory the same conditions were attributed entirely to fantasy. But fantasy actually played a significant part in the seduction theory itself, and although its importance was certainly enhanced when Freud gave up the theory, it was never negligible. In particular, Freud believed that the child rarely had direct access to memory of the seduction. Rather, the experience was mediated in the imagination by sexual stories the child had heard and sexual activities it had observed. The whole process, Freud suggested, was analogous to the formation of dreams, in that the original scene was fragmented, distorted, and mixed with elements from other sources. In other words, the formative power of fantasy was not suddenly and mysteriously revealed to Freud in the wake of the seduction theory. Similarly, the traditional narrative of the seduction hypothesis and its abandonment overdraws the opposition between reality and imagination.

As a historical construct, in sum, the story of the seduction theory considerably distorts Freud’s actual opinions, during the 1890s, about the causes of mental illness. It also misrepresents the character of his conviction. The construct drastically oversimplifies a complex psychological reality when it presents Freud as warmly embracing the seduction hypothesis between 1893 and 1897 and then coldly rejecting it in September 1897. Instead, one ought to speak of his rising and falling confidence in the theory. Just as Freud never believed in it with absolute certainty, so he never gave it up as completely as “abandonment” would imply. The letter of September 21, 1897, definitely marked an intellectual turning point, but it was not the 180 ° reversal that the familiar account suggests. We need to attend to the doubts Freud entertained about the theory during the mid-1890s, as well as to the remarkable ambiguities that accompanied his retreat from it after 1897.

Freud’s confidence in the seduction theory was always fragile. Reading him, one often gets the impression of a man trying to talk himself into believing something, with doubts constantly emerging and having to be overcome. In a case mentioned in the letter to Fliess of November 2, 1895, Freud almost seems to be willing the theory into existence. When the patient produces the “expected” story, Freud’s “confidence” in his idea is increased: “Today I am able to add that one of the cases gave me what I expected (sexual shock—that is, infantile abuse in male hysteria!) and that at the same time a working through of the disputed material strengthened my confidence in the validity of my psychological constructions.”^[53] Doubts become more frequent and agonizing in the spring and summer of 1897. Thus, in the letter of February 11, 1897—in which Freud accuses his own father of seducing his brother and several younger sisters—he concludes, fretfully: “The frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder.” In April we find him confiding that “I myself am still in doubt about matters concerning fathers.” In late May he had his “Hella” dream, in which he experienced “overaffectionate feelings” for his daughter Mathilde, and he frankly interprets this seduction dream as revealing a desire to assuage his misgivings about the “paternal etiology”: “The dream of course shows the fulfillment of my wish to catch a Pater as the originator of neurosis and thus puts an end to my ever-recurring doubts.” Later in the summer his tone becomes more abject. He is, he tells Fliess, “tormented by grave doubts about my theory of the neuroses.”^[54]

Freud’s doubts, in short, had richly prepared the ground for the seeming change of heart announced in the letter of September 21, 1897. Masson may even be right that the hostile response of Freud’s Viennese medical colleagues to his presentation of “The Aetiology of Hysteria” before the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology contributed to those doubts—not in the facile and crude sense that Freud succumbed to “peer pressure” but in the perfectly reasonably sense that people who were in the best position to have an informed view of the matter (namely, his fellow physicians) found his theory unpersuasive. Freud’s immediate reaction, as we have seen, was to write up the paper and publish it. But there may have been an element of bluster in this act of defiance, as is suggested by the intemperate language with which he ends his account of the society’s meeting: “They can go to hell.”^[55]

In addition to the doubts Freud openly expressed, we ought to consider those he may have felt because of his fear that his patients’ stories were being suggested by the analyst. I have already noted the presence of this anxiety in Freud’s pointed insistence that suggestion played no role in the seduction narrative produced by Emma Eckstein’s patient: “Eckstein deliberately treated her patient in such a manner as not to give her the slightest hint of what would emerge from the unconscious and in the process obtained from her, among other things, the identical scenes with the father.”^[56] Even so, the sense of the doctor urging the wanted memory on a reluctant patient is often strongly felt. Freud complains of one neurotic, a banker who fled analysis just at the point where he was about to produce the expected narrative: “My banker, who was furthest along in his analysis, took off at a critical point, just before he was to bring me the last scenes.”^[57] Ironically, the possibility of suggestion is most evident when, in his published papers on the seduction theory, Freud tries to counter doubts about the genuineness of his patients’ stories. In “The Aetiology of Hysteria” he writes: “Before they come for analysis the patients know nothing about these scenes. They are indignant as a rule if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge. Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them.”^[58] In “Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses” the feeling of analytic pressure is even more palpable:

The fact is that these patients never repeat these stories spontaneously, nor do they ever in the course of treatment suddenly present the physician with the complete recollection of a scene of this kind. One only succeeds in awakening the psychical trace of a precocious sexual event under the most energetic pressure of the analytic procedure, and against an enormous resistance. Moreover, the memory must be extracted from them piece by piece.^[59]

We might legitimately conclude that if Freud was not worried about the possible contamination of the seduction stories by suggestion, he certainly should have been. Perhaps the Viennese doctors who assembled to hear “The Aetiology of Hysteria” raised just this spectre. In view of the doubts Freud actually expressed in his letters to Fliess and the additional doubts that he had good reason to entertain, the failure of confidence announced on September 21, 1897, seems less a sudden volte-face than the long-developing and inevitable collapse of a hypothesis that was the product as much of will as of conviction.

The misgivings that precede the September letter are exactly balanced by the lingering hopes that follow it. Jeffrey Masson’s one valuable contribution to Freud studies is to have drawn attention to the two letters of late 1897 in which Freud’s belief in the seduction hypothesis enjoys a brief revival. These letters show that the history of Freud’s opinions about seduction is not adequately encompassed by the familiar image of an intellectual U-turn. The same conclusion is suggested by Freud’s long delay in publicly announcing his change of view and by the ambiguity of his language when, in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he finally addresses the issue. His supposed retraction is so tortuously phrased that it sounds more like a reassertion of the theory’s correctness than a confession of error:

The reappearance of sexual activity [in about the fourth year of life] is determined by internal causes and external contingencies, both of which can be guessed in cases of neurotic illness from the form taken by their symptoms and can be discovered with certainty by psycho-analytic investigation. I shall have to speak presently of the internal causes; great and lasting importance attaches at this period to accidental external contingencies. In the foreground we find the effects of seduction, which treats a child as a sexual object prematurely and teaches him, in highly emotional circumstances, how to obtain satisfaction from his genital zones, a satisfaction which he is then usually obliged to repeat again by masturbation. An influence of this kind may originate either from adults or from other children. I cannot admit that in my paper on “The Aetiology of Hysteria” I exaggerated the frequency or importance of that influence, though I did not then know that persons who remain normal may have had the same experiences in their childhood, and though I consequently overrated the importance of seduction in comparison with the factors of sexual constitution and development.^[60]

This is the language not of abandonment but of reluctant retreat. The fuller account of Freud’s change of opinion given the following year in “My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses” is hardly less ambiguous. Once again, there is an awkward to-ing and fro-ing, in which admissions of the “insufficiencies,” “displacements,” and “misunderstandings” attending his earlier views jostle uncomfortably with reassertions of their fundamental accuracy.^[61] The avowal of error is anything but full-throated, and the untutored reader could well emerge from Freud’s syntactical jungle convinced that he still attributed mental illness to childhood seductions.

As, in an important sense, he still did. Freud never gave up the belief that at least some neuroses originated in real experiences of seduction during childhood. The seduction hypothesis, in other words, was not abandoned but diminished. In the Introductory Lectures of 1916–17, Freud tells his audience, “You must not suppose…that sexual abuse of a child by its nearest male relatives belongs entirely to the realm of phantasy. Most analysts will have treated cases in which such events were real and could be unimpeachably established.”^[62] In the Wolf Man case, written in 1914 and published in 1918, he concludes that his patient’s seduction at a tender age by his sister was not a fantasy but “an indisputable reality.”^[63] Similarly, in 1924 Freud added a footnote to the case of Katharina in Studies on Hysteria reporting that Katharina had fallen ill “as a result of sexual attempts on the part of her own father.”^[64]An Autobiographical Study of 1925 still finds him affirming that “seduction during childhood retained a certain share, though a humbler one, in the etiology of the neuroses.”^[65] As late as 1931, in his essay “Female Sexuality,” Freud discusses fantasies of seduction by the mother or a nurse, to which he adds:

Actual seduction, too, is common enough; it is initiated either by other children or by someone in charge of the child who wants to soothe it, or send it to sleep or make it dependent on them. Where seduction intervenes it invariably disturbs the natural course of the developmental processes, and it often leaves behind extensive and lasting consequences.^[66]

Even the posthumously published Outline of Psycho-Analysis, written the year before his death, reaffirms that “the sexual abuse of children by adults” is “common enough” and often results in neurosis.^[67] The historical trajectory of Freud’s thinking about seduction resembles, if anything, a bell curve. It is not so much a mechanistic narrative of antithesis and displacement as an organic one of growth and decline.

The real importance of the story of the seduction theory and its abandonment lies in its role as a myth of origins. In the traditional account of Freud’s intellectual development, psychoanalysis is born out of the rubble of the seduction hypothesis. The theory was the crippling error whose repudiation was the sine qua non of Freud’s intellectual breakthrough to infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and thus to the foundation of his new science. Ernest Jones calls the abandonment of the seduction theory “one of the great dividing lines in the story” of psychoanalysis.^[68] The notion that the seduction theory had to be shed in order for psychoanalysis to emerge is indeed the most potent and enduring component of the entire historical construct. It gains its plausibility largely from the circumstance that Freud first mentions the Oedipus complex in letters written in October 1897, less than a month after the famous renunciation of September 21, 1897. But I would suggest that we ought to be suspicious of this excessively mechanical and overneat conception, according to which the new (and historically important) idea automatically occupies the intellectual space vacated by its discredited predecessor. In view of Freud’s revived hopes for the seduction theory after September 21, 1897, his long delay in confessing his departures from it, and his continuing belief, to the end of his life, that childhood seductions were real and consequential, we would be better advised to speak of a tension, rather than a categorical opposition, between the seduction theory and the Oedipus theory. The decline of Freud’s confidence in the seduction etiology after September 1897 may have sped up the emergence of the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality. But the proposition that he would never have developed these ideas without abandoning the seduction theory is far from self-evident. Significantly, in a draft sent to Fliess in May 1897—that is, four months before he supposedly jettisoned the seduction hypothesis—Freud had already anticipated an important component of the Oedipus complex. He there observes that neurotics entertain “hostile impulses against parents,” and, further, that “this death wish is directed in sons against their fathers and in daughters against their mothers.”^[69]

The notion that the repudiation of the old theory was a necessary precondition for the rise of the new one did not occur to Freud until years later. Nowhere in the Fliess correspondence or in the classic psychoanalytic texts of the first decade of the twentieth century do we find Freud writing that he had to surmount his traumatic theory of hysteria in order to recognize the autonomous sources of infantile sexuality or the preeminent role of fantasy or the existence of Oedipal desires. Apparently he had not yet arrived at this historical construction. Instead, it makes its appearance, appropriately enough, in his earliest sustained attempt to produce an intellectual autobiography, the 1914 essay “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement.” Here for the first time we get the story of the seduction theory as a kind of felix culpa. Before he could formulate “the hypothesis of infantile sexuality,” Freud writes, “a mistaken idea had to be overcome which might have been almost fatal to the young science.”^[70] The “might have been” and the “almost” somewhat soften the impression of an irreconcilable antithesis between the seduction theory and the theory of infantile sexuality. Nonetheless, the succeeding account of his fortunate escape from the nearly fatal error betrays the sharply dichotomous structure—reality pitted against fantasy—that will distinguish all subsequent accounts of the seduction theory and its abandonment:

Influenced by Charcot’s view of the traumatic origin of hysteria, one was readily inclined to accept as true and aetiologically significant the statements made by patients in which they ascribed their symptoms to passive sexual experiences in the first years of childhood—to put it bluntly, to seduction. When this aetiology broke down under the weight of its own improbability and contradiction in definitely ascertainable circumstances, the result at first was helpless bewilderment. Analysis had led back to these infantile sexual traumas by the right path, and yet they were not true. The firm ground of reality was gone. At that time I would gladly have given up the whole work, just as my esteemed predecessor, Breuer, had done when he made his unwelcome discovery. Perhaps I persevered only because I no longer had any choice and could not then begin again at anything else. At last came the reflection that, after all, one had no right to despair because one has been deceived in one’s expectations; one must revise those expectations. If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in phantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. This reflection was soon followed by the discovery that these phantasies were intended to cover up the auto-erotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now, from behind the phantasies, the whole range of a child’s sexual life came to light.^[71]

The version of this same historical sequence written a decade later in the Autobiographical Study—Freud’s most ambitious effort to fashion a coherent narrative of his intellectual development—begins with a slightly stronger assertion of irreconcilable opposition between the two theories. Here Freud refers to the seduction hypothesis as “an error into which I fell for a while and which might well have had fatal consequences for the whole of my work.”^[72] The antithesis between reality and fantasy is drawn even more extremely than it was in “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement”—to the point that Freud overstates his actual opinion at the time, speaking of the seduction stories as invariably false. Likewise, fathers have become the archetypal seducers and daughters the archetypal victims. In effect, the dichotomous historical construct, with its familiar dramatis personae, has hardened into its definitive form:

Under the influence of the technical procedure which I used at that time, the majority of my patients reproduced from their childhood scenes in which they were sexually seduced by some grown-up person. With female patients the part of seducer was almost always assigned to their father. I believed these stories, and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the subsequent neurosis in these experiences of sexual seduction in childhood. My confidence was strengthened by a few cases in which relations of this kind with a father, uncle, or elder brother had continued up to an age at which memory was to be trusted. If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him; though I may plead that this was at a time when I was intentionally keeping my critical faculty in abeyance so as to preserve an unprejudiced and receptive attitude towards the many novelties which were coming to my notice every day. When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them, I was for some time completely at a loss. My confidence alike in my technique and in its results suffered a severe blow; it could not be disputed that I had arrived at these scenes by a technical method which I considered correct, and their subject-matter was unquestionably related to the symptoms from which my investigation had started. When I had pulled myself together, I was able to draw the right conclusions from my discovery: namely, that the neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful phantasies, and that as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material reality. I do not believe even now that I forced the seduction-phantasies on my patients, that I “suggested” them. I had in fact stumbled for the first time upon the Oedipus complex, which was later to assume such an overwhelming importance, but which I did not recognize as yet in its disguise of phantasy.^[73]

This account, even more than its predecessor of 1914, has all the earmarks of a well-made play. The narrative is altogether too shapely: its protagonist enters boldly upon his intellectual quest, suffers a crisis of faith, but emerges in the end all the more gloriously for having triumphed over his error. It brings to mind Wordsworth’s artful construction of his life as a “crisis-autobiography” in The Prelude,^[74] where the poet’s illusory hopes for the French Revolution play a role analogous to Freud’s mistaken belief in the seduction hypothesis. As Freud himself, following Kipling, might have said, it is a “just-so” story, an intellectual romance, written, significantly, long after the events it purports to chronicle. It exhibits exactly the sort of fierce “retrospective patterning” that ought to arouse our suspicions. The actual history of the seduction theory is more prosaic, ragged, and inconclusive.

The New Puritanism

If I were to speculate about the cultural significance of Jeffrey Masson’s attack on Freud for his suppression of the seduction theory, I would be inclined to view it as one manifestation of the sexual counterrevolution that took place in the 1980s. That is, Masson’s Freud seems to me a product of the new puritanism of the past decade, in much the way that Sulloway’s Freud was a product of the rise of sociobiology in the 1970s. In the realm of sexual thought and behavior—as in politics and economics—the 1980s witnessed a massive reversal of the liberalizing ethos of the 1960s and 1970s. This counterrevolution was adumbrated as early as 1970 in the writings of feminists like Germaine Greer and Kate Millett. In particular, Millett’s Sexual Politics, whose villains were Freud himself and such prophets of sexual release as Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, had the effect of an intellectual cold shower on the erotic enthusiasms of the previous decade. Later, the antipornography wing of the women’s movement, as represented by Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, drew the full repressive implications of Millett’s attack. The new puritanism also found powerful advocates on the old political (and sexual) right, among them Allan Bloom, Roger Scruton, and William Bennett, all of whom railed against the promiscuity of the 1960s. Nature itself conspired to provide the counterrevolution with a grim material foundation in the form of the AIDS epidemic. In short, sex had fallen on hard times. We were made intensely conscious of its liabilities—including the threat it could pose to our lives—and we were correspondingly disinclined to celebrate its raptures.

The most striking feature of the treatment of sex in The Assault on Truth is precisely its joyless puritanism. Masson has only one register for its discussion. Sex boils down to aggression. It is a source of pain and unhappiness. Masson’s book is untouched by any sense of its ecstatic promise, even less by the idea, embraced by such earlier thinkers as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, that sex holds the key to human liberation. Not surprisingly, Masson’s profoundly antisexual rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of the burgeoning contemporaneous literature on incest and child abuse. Appropriately, his book received its warmest reception in just those quarters. It is, in sum, very much a product of its time.

That Masson’s sensibility is of a piece with the sexual counterrevolution is confirmed by the autobiographical revelations he offers in Final Analysis. Nothing obsesses Masson more than his former promiscuity. He originally entered psychoanalytic treatment, he says, in hopes of curbing the compulsive womanizing that was making him so unhappy. Indeed, his promiscuity became the central subject of his training analysis at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute. Repeatedly in Final Analysis Masson grows indignant over what he now considers the smutty minds of his analytic acquaintances. Whether intentionally or not, Janet Malcolm thus created a misleading impression of Masson when, in her New Yorker articles, she portrayed him as a libertine. Masson’s suit against Malcolm focuses, revealingly, on the fact that Malcolm presented as direct quotations two phrases that conjure up just this image: his supposed reference to himself as “an intellectual gigolo” and his claim that he intended to transform the Freud Museum into “a place of sex, women, fun.”^[75] Whatever the truth of the matter, one has to feel a certain sympathy for him. In Masson’s imagination, sex has very little to do with fun. It is, rather, a miserable burden and a means of torture.

Freud, ironically, became a ready victim of the counterrevolution because his sexual views were so richly ambivalent, poised as they were between repression and liberation, between Victorianism and modernism. On the one hand, there was the Freud who, in “ ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” lambasted bourgeois repressiveness and who, in 1915, wrote that “sexual morality—as society, in its most extreme form, the American, defines it—seems to me very contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.”^[76] On the other hand, there was the Freud who recognized that sex is not an unmixed blessing, that it brings its own inherent agonies, and that one person’s pleasure is often purchased with another’s suffering. Nowhere in his writings did Freud take a more astringent view of sex than in his account of the sexual abuse of children in “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” the paper that stands at the heart of Jeffrey Masson’s case.

From the perspective of Masson’s new puritanism, however, Freud was not a figure who explored the complexity of human sexual life—its promise of fulfillment and its no less significant potential for pain and exploitation. Rather, he was someone who, despite having seen the true ugliness of sex, lacked the courage to stand by his insight when it proved unpopular. Psychoanalysis thus failed to develop, as Masson feels it should have, into a movement against the sexual debasement of women and children. Instead, it became virtually the opposite: a doctrine that excused the sexual transgressions of adults, especially men, by assigning blame to the imagination of children, and that, more generally, advocated the liberalization of sexual values and even (in the minds of certain of its radical adepts) invited sexual revolution. It is, I suppose, testimony to the protean richness of Freud’s thought that it could inspire both Masson’s fantasied campaign of sexual retrenchment and the utopian anticipations of erotic release imagined by Reich and Marcuse. But Freud’s own distinctive ambiguity is sacrificed just as brutally on the new altar as it was on the old. He is, if anything, an even less reliable friend of chastity than of liberation. Ultimately, the opposing visions of him conjured up by the sexual left and the sexual right tell us more about their authors’ prejudices and the intellectual climate in which they wrote than about Freud himself.

Notes