Masson - Final analysis: the making and unmaking of a psychoanalyst

Final Analysis

By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Copyright 2012 by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Previously published in print, 1990.

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Also by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Untreed Reads Publishing

Against Therapy

Raising the Peaceable Kingdom

The Assault on Truth

The Cat Who Came in from the Cold

http://www.untreedreads.com

More praise for Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Final Analysis

For all the light Masson sheds once again on the Freudians, this is most of all a fascinating and highly unusual kind of autobiographya truthful account of the subjects own professional traininga side of life we hardly ever hear about.

KATE MILLETT

Even if only a fraction of psychoanalysts and analysands have suffered experience quite so gross as that revealed by Jeffrey Masson, his candid and fascinating account of his unique trajectory through the world of psychoanalysis should cause widespread soul-searching on the real value of years spent on or behind the couch.

DOUG ELLSBERG

A powerful volume whichalong with his other booksmust be read by all mental-health professionals because of Massons passionate insistence that we confront the social realities, the value systems, and the arbitrary abuse of power in actual life.

DR. MARGARET BRENMAN GIBSON

Clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School

Dr. Masson, once the wunderkind of psychoanalysis, tells the inside story of that most pretentious of cults from the unique perspective of one who spent five years on his back on the couch-altar. Final Analysis delivers a lethal injection of skepticism not only to the moribund body of Freudian folklore, but generically to the booming business of mind therapy.

JOHN FRIEDBERG, M.D.

Author of Shock Treatment Is Not Good for the Brain

Final Analysis

The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

For Terri

Acknowledgments

My father and mother read through the manuscript of this book and approved of its publication. I wish to thank the following people who read the manuscript and offered various suggestions: Paula Caplan, Robert Goldman, Sally Sutherland, Terri Masson, John Friedberg, Tim Benneke, Bess Davoran, and Daidie Donnelley, to whom the book is dedicated. As with all the books I have written since 1980, Marianne Loring has been my constant helper, offering me her critical judgment and her splendid levelheadedness.

I especially want to acknowledge the collaboration of my editor, Nancy Miller. She was the editor for my first book, The Assault on Truth , and was practically a coauthor of both that book and the present one. She has read every word over and over, making innumerable suggestions, always with intelligence, tact, and good sense. I have been immensely fortunate to have her as an editor and friend.

I wish also to thank Jane Isay, who showed considerable courage in publishing this book and has been a source of encouragement and inspiration.

Preface

In 1971, more than anything else I wanted to become a psychoanalyst. For the next seven years, in analysis and analytic training, I talked, read, and breathed psychoanalysis.

Final Analysis is the story of my psychoanalytic training; of my friendships with Anna Freud, Kurt Eissler and others, and of why I eventually left that world. If this were just my personal story, I doubt it would be worth telling. But the injustices and corruption I encountered as a psychoanalytic candidate were built into the very training process; the implications, I believe, reach out to every analysis and beyond that to psychotherapy in general. I was not the only person to notice these abuses, but by the time training was over, few of us had escaped the acculturation that made them, from the safe distance of graduation, seem necessary or even normal.

No book has yet told what it is like to undergo training as an orthodox Freudian psychoanalyst. Nor does any book tell what it is like to leave that profitable and prestigious professionthose who have been part of the inner circle of psychoanalysis either do not leave, or have left in discreet silence. Thus, until now it has been almost impossible to get an internal view of the workings of this mens club with its initiation rites; expectations of membership loyalty over truth; pressures to accept concepts handed down by the leader, no matter how irrational; xenophobic banding together against outsiders; and the punishment of anyone who poses questions or finally wants out. It is worth asking why no book like this has appeared before, since people have written accounts of leaving almost every other cult. Why has psychoanalysis cast such an impervious net around those who become attracted to it and then train in it?

I cannot say that I undertook this book without reluctance. I hesitated for three reasons. First, there was my personal pain in reviewing events that were hurtful to me when they happened. It is sometimes alarming for me to look back at my own ignorance, naivet, or sheer blindness. I have winced many times in recollecting things I said and did during this period. George Orwell once said that nobody could ever write a truthful autobiography because the truth would always be too unbearably humiliating. Much of what I have remembered and written about here wounds my sense of who I would like to be.

My second reason for hesitating was that while I might be able to justify exposing myself to the ridicule, contempt, or mere head shaking of an anonymous public, I was not certain that I had the right to expose others who were close to me. Yet there seemed no way for me to write truthfully without doing so. All of the people I have in mind (for example, my mother, my father, my ex-wife) have read the book in manuscript, and while they were not in each instance delighted to find themselves in print in this manner, nobody objected or asked to have passages deleted.

Finally, I was daunted by the problem of accuracy. As an academic I had learned to rely on documents, and felt secure in their use. But now I was forced to fall back on my own memory. How accurate was it? Who can recall, exactly, conversations that took place years in the past? Fortunately, for some of the conversations in this book, including sessions with my analyst, I have notes made immediately afterward. But where I have had to rely on my memory and reconstruct conversations, I have tried to ensure that the words I ascribe to others are authentic by searching out original articles written by those I quote. In a few cases, I used published articles by the people cited to provide quoted text with ideas similar to those expressed at the time. While I am convinced that the dialogues are as true to the spirit of the actual conversations as memory permits, I cannot suggest that they should be regarded as verbatim.