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.