Word: masson
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...intellectual pioneers that we have come to idolize was actually fundamentally flawed seem to be in vogue recently, so it was probably only a matter of time before someone questioned the central tenets of the theories of Sigmund Freud. Yet even for such a strongly iconoclastic work, Jeffrey M. Masson's The Assault on Truth Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory has received a tremendous amount of pre-publication publicity, most of it negative...
...book which is surprisingly interesting and readable, given its heavy documentation. Masson attempts to show why Freud abandoned his earlier seduction theory in favor of theories which emphasized the role of fantasies in producing neuroses. In 1896, a controversial paper Freud called "the Aetiology of Hysteria" proposed that childhood "seduction" was the root cause of most human problems in later life. This interpretation was criticized by other psychiatrists, and ten years later Freud renounced his seduction theory. Traditional psychoanalytic history holds that this abandonment was necessary for the development of Freud's pathbreaking theories of the Oedipus complex and infantile...
...Masson, however, Freud's change of belief was anything but good for psychoanalysis Indeed, Masson even writes. By shitting the emphasis from an actual world of sadnes, misery, and cruelty to an internal stage on which actors performed invented dramas for an invisible audience of their own creation. Freud began a trend away from the real world that, it seems to me, is at the root of the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis and psychiatry throughout the world." In The Assault on Truth Masson traces the circumstances and events which he believes led the young Freud away from the seduction...
...aftermath of this fiasco, Masson maintains, Freud gradually and subconsciously convinced himself that Emma's bleeding was not caused by the actions of his friend Fliess, but occurred for other reasons. Freud came to believe that her spells of bleeding were Emma's ways of expressing a longing for his presence. Freud wrote that "her episodes of bleeding were hysterical, were occasioned by longing" and that "she became restless during the night because of an unconscious wish to entice me to go there, and since I did not come during the night, she renewed the bleeding, as an unfailing means...
...Masson carefully traces this shift, chronicled in the letters Freud wrote to Fliess in the aftermath of the operation. According to Masson. "The powerful tool that Freud was discovering the psychological explanation of physical illness, was being pressed into service to exculpate his own dubious behavior [in allowing the operation] and the even more dubious behavior of his closest friend. Freud has begun to explain away his own bad conscience...