I've been trying to find time to contribute to the discussion of Masson's
Assault on Truth; apologies to those who have tired of that discussion.
1. Like some other people with little taste for theory or the methods and
requirements of building theory, Masson radically over-personalizes the
seduction theory issue and thereby trivializes it. As Anna Freud pointed
out to Masson at the time but he seems not to have understood, big
theoretical issues were at the centre of Freud's shifts at the time,
beside which questions of his personal motives, level of honesty, etc.,
are a trivial sideshow. The big issues include: the existence of
unconscious fantasy; the role of fantasy and other psychic states in the
dynamics of human thought, affect, and action; whether purely psychic
trauma, i.e., trauma without sharp environmental stimulii, can be as
neurotogenic as environmentally-caused trauma (all trauma is psychic
trauma in the first instance, of course; no event no matter how horrific
is in any way traumatic to someone who does not experience it); and so on.
2. Freud changed his mind about real seduction only in a very specific
way. He never believed that all neurosis is the result of environmental
stress (sexual or other) and he never came to believe that none was. What
he changed his mind about was, roughly, the ratio. In the years around
1900, he came to believe that fewer neuroses had significant environmental
stresses in their etiology than he had believed earlier. (Of course, this
may have been nothing more than his looking at the evidence before him
more objectively; there is some reason to think that at least some of his
early cases came to believe that they had been abused as a result of
suggestion on Freud's part.)
3. I doubt very much that anything in the Freud Archives is going to shed
much additional light on Freud's reasons for changing his mind about the
ratio. For one thing, the big theoretical issues that were grinding away
in his mind at the time are not likely to appear in his correspondence,
not in much of it anyway. There were only a handful of people at the
relevant time to whom Freud could have written about such things.
Certainly the final truth about, gasp, whether he was sleeping with his
sister-in-law and similar salacious questions is not going to make the
slightest bit of difference here.
4. Like the seduction issue, Masson is too interesting to brush off with a
few generalities. He was trained and certified as an analyst in Canada, he
left of his own free will -- both the Canadian and the International -- by
dint of not paying fees -- there were sighs of relief when he did so but
he was not pushed -- and, while his training took much longer than usual
-- this is on the public record --, he could have kept his membership for
much longer than he did. I personally think that Assault on Truth misses
so many absolutely central aspects of the environmental vs. purely psychic
issue that it merely trivializes the issue and does not need to be taken
seriously. Masson writes brilliantly and is clearly quite intelligent but
he has no taste for research or scholarship and little interest in
(ability to grasp?) theory. He is mainly interested in personal scandal
and evidence of mistreatment and bad motives and even on these things his
scholarly standards are shockingly low.
        As to Masson the person, I commend his book Final Analysis. If
even 10% of what he says about his training analysis is true, he was not
well served by some of the people he should have been able to rely on.
Masson's training analyst is now dead but some of things he said in
response to Final Analysis, which of course shocked and hurt him deeply,
were not reassuring, not to me at any rate.
5. Finally, a comment on responses to Assault on Truth, the place where
the current exchange began. Virtually every analytic theorist worth his
or her salt and a good many nonanalysts with an interest in analysis
wrote something on that book in the mid-80's. A search of the relevant
indexes for the period would probably reveal 50 to 100 articles, ranging
all the way from Janet Malcolm's famous two part piece in Atlantic through
NYRB articles to dozens and dozens of dense, learned pieces in the
psychoanalytic journals. All the points I have made and a good many
others were made in them at the time.
Best, Andrew Brook
 --
Andrew Brook, Professor of Philosophy
Director, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies
Member, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society