JM: Yes, it was as bizarre as it sounds. I had a friendly relationship with this psychiatrist and had actually gone on a skiing trip with him and his wife. After my talk, he said the fact that I could support Ferenczi's views, after all these years of "clinical wisdom" demonstrated that there is no truth in them, showed that I was, in his words "dangerously mentally ill." He said I needed to spend time in a psychiatric hospital and he was prepared to have me committed right then, if he could get a second affirmative opinion from any of the gathered psychiatrists.
I laughed appreciatively. It was a good performance--he had made his point very dramatically. When I finished laughing I noticed he was not smiling. He said "Jeff, I am serious."
Q: What happened then? Did anyone take him up on his request?JM: There was silence in the room. No one said anything, and I walked out.
Was I prepared for this? No, I thought there would be disagreement or even different interpretations of the material I was presenting--perhaps I had understood it wrong, or got the German off, or did not realize the historical context. But no, it all had to do with how impossible the very idea of child sexual abuse was to psychoanalysis, and indeed, to psychiatry or even psychology in general at the time (the 1970s). One in a million cases was the consensus then. Not the 38% we acknowledge today. So it was a lonely time for me.
I was relieved of my directorship of the Freud Archives, the Freud Copyright, and even membership in the International Psychoanalytic Association. In short, I was thrown out of this world, with a good riddance! Some feminists came to my defence, Catherine MacKinnon, Gloria Steinem, Diana Russell, Judith Herman and some others who had suffered a similar fate, if not so public. Did I have my doubts? Not really, because I was dealing with new historical material that was very clear. I was not talking from my own clinical experience, limited as that was. I was speaking as an historian.
Q: And then there was that saga about your lawsuit against Janet Malcolm and "The New Yorker Magazine." She spent a year interviewing you, in person and over the phone, and ended up writing a series of articles that could only be viewed as a hit piece. She invented some outlandish quotes that you supposedly said and, initially, she didn't attempt to hide the fact that they were inventions"?
JM: Yes, Janet Malcolm came from a family of psychoanalysts, so definitely had an agenda in writing the articles. Initially she claimed that she was entitled to invent quotes, since, in her words, "a journalist is not a stenographer." She had a whole article in "The New York Review of Books" where she elaborated on that claim. She felt she was free to portray me however the artistic impulse led her, or as she explained "Jeffrey Masson, c'est moi."
Q: So you sued for libel?
JM: Yes. A few years into the case, she realized maybe she'd made a mistake by insisting that she was free to make up quotes. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that was the issue they were considering. Could a journalist portray a subject's words as if they were writing a novel? Or did they have to present factual quotes? The Supreme Court ruled in my favor, and sent it back to the lower court to decide the case.
Since Malcolm realized she couldn't win by saying she was entitled to make things up, she suddenly announced that her nephew, a toddler, was crawling around and found some notes written by her behind a bookcase, that coincidentally had all the quotes in them that were in dispute. None of them appeared in the 40 hours of tapes she had made in preparation for writing the articles.
Q: Lucky for her the dog didn't eat them! What did the lower court decide?
JM: It was a long process, going through two court cases. In the end they said since I was a public figure, the rules for libel were different. I would have to show her articles had hurt my career, which was difficult since I had since become a bestselling author, and also that she had acted with malice. The jury realized that some of the quotes had been altered significantly but it's impossible to prove that someone didn't say something. The court ruled that I couldn't prove all the elements necessary for libel, and I lost the case.
Q: So like the other non-conforming analysts you've been discussing, you yourself were attacked and marginalized for daring to bring up this topic, which is so alarming to people. You mentioned Freud's seeming-paranoia when his theory was rejected. But i'm beginning to feel that it is Emma Eckstein who would have been right to feel paranoid. She provided the inspiration and research for Freud's brilliant theory about the origin of neurosis in many of his patients, and then he conspired with a male colleague to have her given a bizarre operation that had profoundly detrimental effects on her life, and presumably her work. It almost seems symbolic of how the theory of childhood sexual abuse as a major contributing factor in women's emotional pain was mutilated and silenced before it could even emerge. Would you agree?
JM: Yes, absolutely. Freud was guilty of negligence--Fliess had no business performing an unnecessary and dangerous operation in a foreign city with no back-up--as well as foolishness. Why would Freud ever agree to something as pointless and even ridiculous? I don't think he consciously conspired with Fliess at the beginning. However, once the horrendous damage to Emma was done, he sided with the perpetrator, and said it was due to her emotional state that she had such long-lasting symptoms as a result of the botched surgery. I imagine Freud felt guilty for the rest of his life, since he owed Emma a great deal.Q: Over a century has passed since Freud presented his views on this topic. Do you think the public is now ready to give validation to the existence of childhood sexual assault?
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