Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

188 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
Freud's recantation reads like something out of Stalin's trials of the 1930s
when Freud writes of his patients .. .
I believed (their) stories, and consequently supposed that I had discovered
the roots of the subsequent neuroses in these experiences of sexual
seduction in childhood ... If the reader feels inclined to shake his
head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him.
In fact Freud went so far as to say that "... I was at last obliged to recognize
that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they
were only fantasies which my patients had made up." In other words, his
patients had lied to him, and he had been naive to believe them. Rather
than having been victims of sexual advances from their parents, they had
made up stories "to cover up the recollection of infantile sexual activity
..." He continues: "The grain of truth contained in this fantasy lies in the
fact that the father, by way of his innocent caresses in earliest childhood,
has actually awakened the little girl's sexuality (the same thing applies to
the little boy and his mother)."
According to Masson, "giving up his 'erroneous' view allowed Freud
to participate again in a medical society that had earlier ostracized him. In
1905 Freud publicly retracted the seduction theory. By 1908, respected
physicians had joined Freud: Paul Federn, Isidor Sadger, Sandor Ferenczi,
Max Eitingon, Karl Jung. . . . The psychoanalytic movement had been
born but an important truth had been left behind."
When Masson went on to publish his beliefs about why Freud had
abandoned the seduction theory, the psychoanalytic community did not at
all take kindly to his indictment of the foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis.
The Assault On Truth became itself the object of derision and
pressure from the psychoanalytic community which refused to believe the
evidence that Masson was publishing.
The first indication of trouble ahead came from Freud's daughter, Anna
Freud, who voiced her displeasure when Masson began pressing her for
the reasons why the letters quoted above had never been published. But
the full fury of the psychoanalytic establishment was to come after the
publication of preliminary papers divulging the author's discoveries, particularly
those surrounding Freud's studies at the Paris Morgue in the
1880s. There he was likely to have witnessed autopsies performed on children
who had been sexually mutilated and murdered by adults.
What Masson was doing in his research for The Assault On Truth was
nothing less than uncovering evidence so damning that it called into question
the whole foundation of psychoanalysis itself. Anna Freud virtually
admitted that she had deleted her father's crucial letters dealing with the
seduction theory and childhood rape. Masson wrote: