Final Analysis: the Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst

The former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives exposes psychoanalytic training as a bizarre, inequitable socialization process and reveals what the gurus of psychoanalysis are really like

In becoming a psychoanalyst, Masson, like Shakespeare's Malvoleo, mistook the trappings for the thing itself; that he never achieved the power he bestowed on such figures as Kurt Eissler and Anna Freud is his continuing complaint. He trained at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute and, even before graduating in 1978, insinuated himself into the international psychoanalytic community. As projects director of the Freud Archives in London, he hypothesized that Freud had deliberately suppressed his seduction theory. Masson ( Against Therapy ) faults his teachers for not hewing to the principle of full disclosure (failing to note that part of the psychoanalytic equation requires hiddenness) yet rails against their discussion of analysands. Best to read is his affectionate account of his tyrannous training analysis; worst, his fawning over analysts with clout. Masson left the "cult" of psychoanalysis without developing his own practice; the disappointment and blame that propel this volume suggest the rage of a child at a parent's fallibility. He makes no mention of his much publicized, unsuccessful libel suit against Janet Malcolm for her 1983 New Yorker profile.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A former projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, Masson claims that he was fired for espousing and publicizing views concerning the sexual abuse of children that radically challenged psychoanalytic theories. Since then, he has been a thorn in the side of mental health professionals with his searing critiques of therapy. Here he abandons his formidable research skills for a personal glimpse into how, in his training and psychoanalytic career, he too became enmeshed in the mystique that psychoanalysis could cure unhappiness and that analysts were all wise and moral. Although Masson describes with great candor his wasted analysis, his rise in the elite inner circle, and his close ties with Kurt Eissler and Anna Freud, this is no autobiography but rather an attempt to knock psychoanalysis from its pedestal once and for all. Recommended.
- Janice Arenofsky, formerly with Arizona State Lib., Phoenix
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.