Books
Defender of the Faith
•
Thomas Szasz
Freud: The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Faber & Faber £9.95)
In every society and culture, people have definite ideas about what constitutes right and wrong sexual conduct and are firmly convinced that these ideas are based on religious or scientific truths. When Freud was a young doctor, the prevailing sexual-regulatory idea was that self-abuse (as masturbation was then called) was a boundlessly dangerous habit causing insan- ity and other untold and unmentionable calamities. Besides syphilis and heredity, masturbation was considered the leading — virtually the only other — cause of mental illness. So strongly was this view held that anyone predicting the imminent disappearance of both neurosyphilis and masturbatory insanity would have been regarded as utterly mad, expecting the arrival of a veritable psychiatric utopia, a world without mental illness!
Freud inherited these beliefs and be- came one of the most influential reformu- lators and advocates of the masturbatory theory of mental illness. Since the erotic stimulation of children by adults encour- ages them to engage in masturbation, it is not surprising that Freud thought very dimly of sexual seduction and regarded it as a cause of 'hysteria'. (Significantly, he ignored the fact that the sexual seduction of the child by the adult epitomises the exploitation and domination of the weak by the_strong, injuring the former existen- tially and politically rather than 'medical- ly'. But that is another story.) Briefly, this is the cultural-sexual context in which the events discussed by Mr Masson must be placed and in the light of which they must be considered. What, then, are we to think of this book in which masturbatory insanity is not even mentioned? The index also does not list lues, syphilis, neurosyphilis, paresis, or general paralysis of the insane.
As the title suggests, Mr Masson is trying to tell us that Freud was a liar. His thesis is simple enough. Freud had two 'theories' of the 'aetiology of hysteria': one was that this (supposed) disease is caused by the actual seduction of children by adults (principally of girls by their fathers or other male relatives); the other was that it is caused by their fantasied seduction. Clearly, in the language of psychoanalysis, which Masson mouths uncritically, these are both 'seduc- tion theories'. Masson accepts the first theory as true, rejects the second as false, and goes to some length to show how Freud had made a Faustian pact, gaining fame and power in return for betraying the Truth.
How could someone be so ignorant and confused about the nature and history of psychoanalysis? The answer to this ques- tion may lie in who Mr Masson is, or, more precisely, who he was before he became (for a short time at least) the Number Two Man in the psychoanalytic Establishment. He was a 'Sanskrit scholar', but that did not continue to interest him. What then happened to him (as told by Janet Malcolm in her recent book In the Freud Archives) is what happened to many of the early psychoanalytic patients and what happens to many aimless young people who join cults. Adrift in his own life, eager to be 'seduced' into embracing Freud's 'cause', he became a psychoanalyst. So zealous a defender of the Freudian faith did he become that Kurt Eissler, the official guardian of the Freud Archives, chose him as his successor. Masson then turned against his 'benefactors' and was fired by them. Further details of this absurd affair need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that while Masson has been portrayed as having 'seduced' Eissler, to me the evi- dence suggests a richer interplay of greed, grandiosity and gullibility, with Eissler and Masson alternately playing the roles of confidence man and gull. It is difficult not to feel that these two men deserved each other, and that Freud has richly deserved them both.
What, then, is Masson doing in this book? As Eissler has done before him„
Masson is putting himself forward as the only person on earth in possession of 'the Truth' about Freud and his ideas. His grounds for advancing this ridiculous claim are twofold: one is the premise, never examined or even articulated, that Freud was a scientist and that his original 'seduc- tion theory of hysteria' is true; the other is that no unbiased person other than himself has had access to certain secret papers in the Freud Archives which support his speculations about why Freud switched from seduction theory 1 to seduction theory 2. Masson naively thinks that prov- ing that Freud had no valid reasons for changing theories is the same as proving the validity of the first. It does not seem to, occur to him that both could be invalid, or that they might not be genuine scientific theories at all.
Like Karl Kraus, Jaspers, Popper, and others before me, I do not regard psychoanalysis as a science. To castigate Masson for treating Freud as a scientist would be like flogging the proverbial dead horse. It is worth pointing out, however, that Masson's reverence for the original, uncorrupted version of the 'science' of psychoanalysis has led him to accept lock, stock and barrel — the linguistic apparatus of this psycho-mythology. As a result, his book exemplifies the sort of semantic self-entrapment against which Sir James Fitzjames Stephen warned when he wrote, 'Men have an all but incurable propensity to try to pre-judge all the great questions which interest them by stamping their prejudices upon their language.' For what exactly is 'hysteria'? Masson never questions that it is a disease and, of course, never wonders what kind of disease it And what does he mean by 'seduction The sexual arousal of children by adultsY The use of children's bodies by adults for their own erotic satisfaction? Beating and killing children in connection with sonic presumably sexual act? He refers to all of these things indiscriminately as 'sexual seduction'.
In short, Masson does not have the slightest suspicion that the language of psychoanalysis is a swamp of metaphors' and that the purported disease called 'hYs- teria' and its supposed aetiology, th_e, 'seduction theory', are simply literaliseo. metaphors. It is as if the later Freud had rejected the error of transubstantiation (seduction as reality), and proclaimed the truth of consubstantiation (seduction as fantasy). Now comes Masson, citing hitherto unavailable evidence from the Sacred Book (the secret Freud Archives), to prove the truth of the former and the error of the latter. As history or science, the material be- tween the covers of this book is worthless. Whatever interest Freud: The Assault Truth commands rests solely on the grown
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that its author has become a dramatis, persona in one of the great religious of our day. Hence, those wl% believe that psychoanalysis is a science a', well as a method of curing mental Hines'
and that Freud was a great and good man will dismiss this book as vengeful and unbalanced, whereas those who harbour no such beliefs will see it as the lamenta- tions of a naive but conceited cult member protesting the purity of his own faith in a selfless effort to protect the Prophet from those who preach a false gospel, including the Prophet himself.
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