A couple of points in response to Eric's last post:
 
1. The analytic community did not criticize Masson at the stage at which
he was still reading his papers around in the community not out of any
suppression of desire to or other unwillingness to criticize, but
because many analysts openly admired what he was writing! Leonard
Shengold is quoted somewhere, I think in Malcolm, as calling him 'Canada's
national treasuer' (what an irony it is that of all the analysts Canada
has produced Jeffrey Masson should be one who is by far the best known).
Charles Hanly wrote a paper with him on narcissism. Ericsson made him head
of the Freud Archives. Anna Freud invited him to stay with her when he was
in London. This despite the fact that he was already casting the darkest
aspersions on Freud's character.
 
Later, when he published his whole story in Assault ... and it became
clear how bad his work had been, the community was not remotely shy about
trying to pin his hide to the wall.
 
2. I agree that in the period from before WWII till maybe ten years ago,
the English-speaking analytic community treated the phenomena of real
childhood abuse, including sexual abuse, with -- at best -- serious
neglect. It does not do, however, to say that `Freud could have told them'
and `Freud must have known.' We need *evidence* if we are to blame Freud
for this turn -- a turn limited to English-speaking analysis moreover.
Such evidence as I am aware suggests that the late 20's Freud had already
backed out of day to day regulation of the analytic community almost
emtirely, turning it over to Jones and others. To my mind, Jones was less
flexible intellectually on a number of issues than Freud was.
 
3. On contemporary analysts not writing about false memory: see Person, E.
and Klar, H. 1994. Establishing Trauma: The difficulty distinguishing
between memories and fantasies. JAPA 42/4 1055-80. They explicitly address
both the issue of how to tell which is which, and the issue of why there
are so few cases involving actual environmental abuse in the literature.
 
 --
 
Andrew Brook, Professor of Philosophy
Director, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies
Member, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
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