Word: masson
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...time when all the shrinks go on vacation, leaving behind heat, humidity and the miasma of anxiety surrounding their patients. What are these abandoned psyches supposed to do for a whole month? This summer offers them a new option. They might pick up a copy of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's Against Therapy, turn to the preface and read the following: "This is a book about why I believe psychotherapy, of any kind, is wrong. Although I criticize many individual therapists and therapies, my main objective is to point out that the very idea of psychotherapy is wrong...
This is not the first time that Masson, a nonpracticing psychoanalyst, has published a book designed to drive mental-health professionals nuts. His The Assault on Truth (1984) attracted headlines and controversy with the charge that Sigmund Freud had fudged certain of his evidence and thereby left the whole foundation of psychoanalysis teetering. According to Masson, Freud had initially believed his female patients during the 1890s when they told him of being sexually abused, often by fathers or other relatives. But under strong pressure from a male colleague, and knowing how little his fellow Viennese cared to hear...
...Masson harks back to this accusation fairly often in Against Therapy, but Freud is not specifically his target this time. Instead, the author is gunning for everyone who has ever had the gall to offer any sort of psychological treatment or aid to another person. His subtitle accurately indicates just how hyperventilating his argument is going to be: "Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing." Readers looking for nuance or subtlety should probably go elsewhere. But Masson raises some intriguing points, even if he insists on doing so at the top of his voice. Psychotherapy...
Actually, Masson goes much further than this. "The therapeutic relationship," he writes, "always involves an imbalance of power. One person pays; the other receives. Vacations, time, duration of the sessions are all in the hands of one party. Only one person is thought to be an 'expert' in human relations and feelings. Only one person is thought to be in trouble." Well, one is tempted to say, yes indeed, that is the way it happens. Masson, however, is an absolutist; he is of the persuasion that if something is not perfect it is terrible. This point of view rarely works...
...been painted by American women? And what serious artist wants gender to be the primary classification of her art? Lee Krasner did not want to be in a ghetto with "women artists" -- she wanted to be seriously compared, as she now is, with men like Jackson Pollock and Andre Masson. Most living artists feel the same way, and this fact alone will guarantee the irrelevance of the National Museum of Women in the Arts for years to come...