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Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

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Dr. Jeffrey Masson

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (b. March 28, 1941 as Jeffrey Lloyd Masson/ place of birth: Chicago, Illinois ), an American residing in New Zealand, is the author of a number of books on a wide range of subjects and iconoclastic former psychoanalyst.

He has written extensively on the lives of many animals and on animal rights but he is perhaps best-known for concluding that Sigmund Freud may have changed his mind about his "seduction theory" because he feared that granting the truth of his female patients' reports about sexual abuse would hinder the acceptance of the psychoanalytic methods he had pioneered.

Life and work

Jeffrey Masson was born into a comfortable American Jewish family. His mother Diana (Dina) Zeiger comes from a strictly Ashkenazi Orthodox Jewish family. His father, Jacques Moussaieff, has been a Bukharian Jew (both parents from Bukhara), his family being of Mizrahi origin. (Masson in his book "My Father's Guru" says that the family of his father has been of sephardic origin.) Both were followers of the British mystic Paul Brunton. During the 1940s and 1950s, Brunton often lived with them, eventually designating their son as his heir apparent. In 1956, Diana and Jacques Masson moved to Uruguay because Brunton believed that a third world war was imminent. Jeffrey and Linda Masson followed in 1959. At Brunton's urging, Masson went to Harvard University to study Sanskrit. While at Harvard, Masson became disillusioned with Brunton. Brunton and his influence and the Masson family form the subject of Masson's autobiographical book My Father's Guru: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion.

Harvard University granted Masson a B.A. in 1964 and a Ph.D. with Honors in 1970; his degrees were in Sanskrit and Indian Studies. While undertaking his Ph.D., Masson also studied, supported by fellowships, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the University of Calcutta, and the University of Poona. He taught Sanskrit and Indian Studies at the University of Toronto, 1969-80, reaching the rank of Professor. He has also held short term appointments at Brown University, the University of California, and the University of Michigan. From 1981 to 1992, he was a Research Associate, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, at the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

In 1970, Masson began studying to become a psychoanalyst at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute, completing a full clinical training course in 1978. During this time, he befriended the psychoanalyst Kurt Eissler and became acquainted with Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna Freud. Eissler designated Masson to succeed him as Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives after his and Anna Freud's death. Masson learned German and studied the history of psychoanalysis. In 1980 Masson was appointed Projects Director of the Freud Archives, with full access to Freud's correspondence and other unpublished papers. While perusing this material, Masson concluded that Freud might have rejected his so-called seduction theory in order to advance the cause of psychoanalysis and to maintain his own place within the psychoanalytic inner circle [1]. Masson was one of three men (the others are Kurt Eissler and Peter Swales) whose actions form the subject of 'In the Freud Archives', a book by Janet Malcolm that became the subject of a decade-long, $10 million defamation lawsuit.

In 1981, Masson's controversial conclusions were discussed in a series of New York Times articles by Ralph Blumenthal, to the dismay of the psychoanalytic establishment. Masson was subsequently dismissed from his position as project director of the Freud Archives [2] and stripped of his membership in psychoanalytic professional societies. He later wrote several books critical of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychiatry, including The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. When he decided to publish his views about child sexual abuse, Alice Miller helped him. 1985 Masson edited the complete letters between Freud and Fliess after having convinced Anna Freud to make all of them available (and after having done the translation by himself). He also looked up the original places and documents in Salpêtrière Hospital[3] in Paris, where Freud had studied with Charcot.

Reaction of psychoanalytic community

The psychoanalytic community largely rejects Masson's conclusions.[citation needed] though they have not been deeply discussed. Daniel Burston for example states that "Masson mistakenly argues that the validity of psychoanalysis hinges on a single etiological hypotheses -- namely, the seduction theory." [4] Burston misunderstands that this has not been a matter of a single "etiological hypotheses" only but a decision about memory talking from experience or memory deriving from fantasy (which does not include real perpetrators). Masson writes that people used to be very interested in himself, but as far as the cause was concerned there is silence from the scientific community. [5]

Lawsuit

Janet Malcolm interviewed Masson at length when writing her long New Yorker article on this controversy. Masson sued the New Yorker for defamation, claiming that Malcolm had misquoted him; the ensuing trial drew considerable attention.[6]The decade-long, $US10 million lawsuit came to a close when the court ruled in Malcolm's favour.[7]

Recent work

In recent years, Masson has written several books on the emotional life of animals, one of which, When Elephants Weep, has been translated into 20 languages. He also wrote a book about his new home country New Zealand, including an interview with Sir Edmund Hillary [8]. Between other Masson and Hillary talk about Alexandra David-Neel and the story of her Tulpa, both of them having read her books Magic and Mystery in Tibet, Initiation and Initiates in Tibet and My Journey to Lhasa. Masson says that at the age of 16, in 1957, he met her in her country house in the south of France, in Digne.

He was once engaged to the feminist legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon, who wrote the preface to A Dark Science. Masson explains why he changed so radically the subject of his writing career:

I'd written a whole series of books about psychiatry, and nobody bought them. Nobody liked them. Nobody. Psychiatrists hated them, and they were much too abstruse for the general public. It was very hard to make a living, and I thought, As long as I'm not making a living, I may as well write about something I really love: animals.[9]

In his Note on U.G. Masson shows that besides animals, he loves wise human beings.

The main reason for this fascination is the person in front of me, U.G. Krishnamurti himself. For while he abjures every single attribute of the guru, he also speaks of a strange life. Bizarre things have happened to him that have not happened to other ordinary people (but are strangely parallel to mystic experiences in reverse): he had a "catastrophe" that nearly killed him physically. He speaks of it obscurely. Other mystics are "illuminated". He is anti-illuminated, powerfully. Everything he is is calculated to be as unlike the traditional guru as possible. And yet, even if for the opposite reason, he, too, has no desires, he does not sleep, he does not dream, he eats no meat. There is some compelling purity about him, some way in which he captures a kind of longing that we all seem to have for a genuinely wise human being. I would not be afraid to characterize U.G. as a man of wisdom, not quite like the one described in the Bhagavadgita (the Sthitaprajña) but not entirely unlike him either. A paradox, a wonder, a marvel, a fine human being.

Quote taken from "Doctor Jeffrey Masson"

I haven't lost my interest in trauma, in poverty, social justice, in human rights. These things are all important to me. And they all feel to me part of the same thing - it's the ability to see through the way we've been acculturated, usually to believe some lie or other that gets us by. It's that desire to penetrate that lie, to go beyond that barrier and discover what is the case. Whatever it's about there are no end to things that if you look behind and you think about them more deeply, you eventually reach a truth . That is what I believe. The problem is my truth is not your truth. It's very difficult, but I think we must spend our life searching for that truth.

Personal life and family history

Masson is married to Leila Siller, a pediatrician; they have two children: Ilan and Manu. Masson also has a daughter -Simone- from a previous marriage. Masson's great grandfather was Shlomo Moussaieff (rabbi). Masson's great grandmother (Shlomo Moussaieff's wife), Esther Gaonoff, also had some Moroccan Jewish ancestry. Shlomo Moussaieff's son was Henri Moussaieff, Masson's grandfather. Henri Moussaieff was the brother of Rehavia Moussaieff. Rehavia Moussaieff's son was Shlomo Moussaieff (businessman) and Shlomo Moussaieff's daughter is First Lady of Iceland Dorrit Moussaieff. Since Dorrit Moussaieff's grandfather and Masson's grandfather are brothers, Masson is the second cousin of Dorrit Moussaieff.

Writings by Masson

Masson bibliography.

  • 1974. "India and the Unconscious: Erik Erikson on Gandhi," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 55: 519-26
  • 1978. "Buried Memories on the Acropolis. Freud's Relation to Mysticism and Anti-Semitism", 59 (1978): 199-208. (Jeffrey Masson und Terri C. Masson)
  • 1980. The Oceanic Feeling: The Origins of Religious Sentiment in Ancient India. (Table of contents)
  • 1981. The Peacock's Egg: Love Poems from Ancient India, W. S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson, eds. ISBN 0-86547-059-6
  • 1984. The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. Farrar Straus & Giroux. ISBN 0-374-10642-8
  • 1984. Freud and the Seduction Theory A challenge to the foundations of psychoanalysis The Atlantic Monthly | February 1984
  • 1985. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, (editor) ISBN 0-674-15420-7
  • 1986. A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality and Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century. ISBN 0-374-13501-0, last edition 1988
  • 1988. Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing. ISBN 0-689-11929-1
  • 1990. Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of A Psychoanalyst. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-52368-X, new edition 2003
  • 1993. My Father's Guru: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion, Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-56778-4
  • Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs.
  • 1995. When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Life of Animals.
  • The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals.
  • The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey Into the Feline Heart. ISBN 0345448820
  • The Cat Who Came in from the Cold. Wheeler. ISBN 1587249146
  • The Emperors Embrace Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood.
  • The Evolution of Fatherhood: A Celebration of Animal and Human Families.
  • Raising the Peaceable Kingdom: What Animals Can Teach Us about the Social Origins of Tolerance and Friendship.
  • Lost Prince : The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. [10]
  • Slipping into Paradise: Why I live in New Zealand. ISBN 0-345-46634-9
  • 2006. Altruistic Armadillos - Zen-Like Zebras: A Menagerie of 100 Favorite Animals. ISBN 978-0-345-47881-8 (0-345-47881-9)
  • undated, [1]
  • 1995 A Note on U.G. Krishnamurti

Book reviews

Notes

  1. ^ "Did Freud's Isolation Lead Him to Reverse Theory on Neurosis?" by Ralph Blumenthal, New York Times, August 25, 1981
  2. ^ "Freud Archives Research Chief Removed in Dispute Over Yale Talk" by Ralph Blumenthal, New York Times November 9, 1981
  3. ^ History of La Salpêtrière
  4. ^ Freud, the Serpent and the Sexual Enlightenment of Children/DANIEL BURSTON
  5. ^ 1990. Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of A Psychoanalyst. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-52368-X.
  6. ^ David Margolick (1994-11-03). "Psychoanalyst Loses Libel Suit Against a New Yorker Reporter". The New York Times. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |work= (help)
  7. ^ SMH article October 6, 2007
  8. ^ chapter seven of Slipping into Paradise "A Conversation with a Great Ordinary Kiwi:Sir Edmund Hillary"
  9. ^ http://www.powells.com/authors/masson.html
  10. ^ Review

Further reading

  • Kurt R. Eissler, Freud and the seduction theory: A brief love affair, New York: International Universities Press, 2001
  • Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives, New York Review of Books, 2002, ISBN 159017027X
  • Sthitaprajna (Perfect Yogi) - Part 2
  • Luna Tarlo, The Mother of God, Plover Press, 1997, ISBN 9781570270437

Interviews


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