Skip to primary content

Sex, Women, Fun | Aug 14 2000

My friend John Shaw sent a recent email in which he took up my piece from two days ago on the Freud/Jung split. John discusses Janet Malcolm’s book “In the Freud Archives” and the subsequent libel trial initiated by the book’s central figure, Jeffrey Masson, who according to Malcolm was angling to become the caretaker of the Freud Museum in London and make it a place of “sex, women, fun.” John writes:

The story of Freud and Jung’s mutual deceit is interesting. I had not heard that consensus opinion had decided that Freud’s affair with his sister-in-law was undisputed. I highly recommend a book about the emergence of the theory of the Freud/Bernays affair called “In the Freud Archives,” by Janet Malcolm. Amazing book. The first half of the book is a profile of the handsome, glamorous, womanizing (what an interesting word that is!) Freud scholar Jeffrey Masson, and how he pissed off the Freud scholarship establishment by using his position as a staffer at the Freud Archives in New York to get access to material that gave substance to his theory that Freud LIED when he stopped believing women who said that they had been “seduced” (the more contemporary word is “raped”) by their fathers. Masson (a Canadian psychoanalyst) had his suspicions about Freud, but he hid them and “seduced” the aging founder of the Freud Archives – a Viennese psychoanalyst named Kurt Eissler (I think “Kurt” is right, though my memory may be Deceiving me).

The second half of the book introduces a third major character to the romantic farce of scholars and Freudian partisanship: an independent, bohemian, lower-class, never-been-to-college (interesting topic in itself, oh Michael), English, former-roadie-for-the-Rolling-Stones, energetic Freud scholar named Peter Swales. Swales has this theory that Freud and Minna Bernays had an affair, but he wants access to the Freud Archives, so he “seduces” Masson and Eissler, and the whole thing ends badly, with everyone hating each other, and broken hearts all around (I mean between the 3 Freud scholars). Swales comes off as the shrewdest of the three. Though the writer, Malcolm, plainly finds him distasteful, and thinks that both Masson and Swales are wrong in calling Freud a Liar. Masson comes off as an arrogant, ridiculous, amazing, very very smart, very very gifted, very very foolish buffoon.

Great historical footnote to the story: Masson sued Malcolm for libel. Longtime successful seducer that he was, he thought that there was no way a woman journalist would make him look foolish in a book. But she did, and how. Among other things – many other things – she wrote of how he had planned to “win over” Freud’s aging daughter, the psychoanalyst, author, and keeper-of-the-flame Anna Freud (Freud used to call her “my Antigone,” who, if you don’t remember, was the daughter of Oedipus who was put to death for loyalty to him and his sons – how’s that for a fucked-up nickname for the author of the Oedipus complex to lay on his daughter?). By “winning over” Anna Freud and Eissler, Masson would eventually have become the caretaker of the Freud Museum in London, Freud’s old house. And Malcolm quoted him as saying that he would make it a place of “sex, women, fun.”

Masson sued for libel, and got Malcolm’s notes and tapes of their conversations. That phrase, “sex, women, fun,” was nowhere to be found among her backup material. The lawsuit took many, many years. I don’t remember who “won” in the end, but if Masson won the jury awarded him no damages. It seems that at the trial, Malcolm’s clever lawyer had lured Masson into a trap. You see, the terrible things that Malcolm COULD have written about Masson were not automatically admissable into the trial. But the lawyer got Masson to open the door with the question, “Do you think Malcolm made you look as bad as she possibly could?” and Masson said, “Yes.” And it turns out that he told Malcolm that he had had an idea to write a book about sex in different the countries in the world, and he would write this book by traveling the world with a woman, and by each of them having sex with men and women in all the countries they go to, and then writing about it. And Malcolm – demurely? out of pity? – kept it out of her book. And Masson lost the trial.

Other footnote: During the course of the trial, Malcolm wrote a book about another journalist being sued by a person he had written about. In the book, she says that journalists are fundamentally seducers, trying to get people to open up to them, so that they can use them to their own ends – writing a story. And she says something to the effect that any journalist worth his or her salt knows that what they do is dishonorable. And of course, journalists everywhere hated her for it.