Gotham Diary:
The Symptom
30 July 2013
When I got [to Harvard], the first thing I did was to persuade them to make me a sophomore. I shouldn’t have even been a freshman! But for some reason they agreed to make me a sophomore. Then I decided that it was beneath me to live in the dorms, so I talked my way into a three-room apartment at a place called the Center for the Study of World Religions, where visiting professors and graduated students lived. I was unbearable. But Harvard was unbearable, too.
If you re-read In the Freud Archives in its new, NYRB edition, you’ll find an Afterward at the back, in which Janet Malcolm sets forth a brief account of the libel suits brought against her by Jeffrey Moussaief Masson, the fellow who spent his sophomore year at Harvard living with visiting professors and grad students, and who came to feel that In the Freud Archives defamed him. The Afterword ought to be a Foreword, because Malcolm reports the passages that offended Masson. Having noted them, you can then read her book, your mouth agape at all the things that Masson did not feel to be actionable, such as the marvel of fatuousness that I’ve copied out, and which therefore have his implied, or at least legal, blessing. (Masson appears to be making fun of himself, but the impression is too calculated to be sincere.)
There’s a word that recurs several times in Archives that seems to apply to much of what I’ve read by Janet Malcolm: Menschenkenner. A Menschenkenner is someone good at judging the character of others, and especially good at resisting the overestimation of talents and charms. Malcolm’s work is in large part a gallery of men and women who are not Menschenkenner. Jeffrey MacDonald and Joe McGuinness, in The Murderer and the Journalist, are well-matched in their lack of Menschenkennerheit. And poor Sheila McGough! All three succumb to positive first impressions, and if they come to rue the consequences, that doesn’t imply a change of heart about the source of disappointment.
In In the Freud Archives, people who are poor judges of character have the stage pretty much to themselves, beginning with Sigmund Freud himself. “Breuer, Fliess, and Jung were the most prominent of those who came within the orbit of Freud’s propensity for idealization followed by disillusionment,” writes Malcolm. Then there’s Kurt Eissler, the dean of Freudian analysts, gruff but ultimately lovable, and completely bedazzled by the precocious Masson. (Masson’s lack of skill as a Menschenkenner appears to stem from a want of interest in other people, making him more reckless than idealistic.) Malcolm’s principal story concerns the hiring and firing of Masson by Eissler, as his successor at the Freud Archives, which Eissler directed — a complicated operation about which it need be said only that access to it is very difficult, and therefore bathed with prestige by those seeking entry. Almost everyone whom Eissler knew advised him that Masson was not the right man for the job, and not just because Masson had no experience directing an archive. Whoever held the position, it was understood, would necessarily stand as a sort of ideological guardian of the Freudian heritage. Few people regarded Masson as any kind of guardian of anything.
Malcolm explores this heritage — an interesting one, not least for its controversies — in some detail. The crux of the story is Freud’s abandonment of the “seduction theory,” and his subsequent development of its replacement, which still strikes non-Freudians as remarkably far-fetched — the theory of the Oedipus Complex. Jeffrey Masson, for whatever reasons good or bad, came to believe that Freud abandoned seduction for “non-scientific” reasons, and that he subsequently realized that he had been mistaken to do so, but concealed his misgivings. Masson wanted access to the Freud Archives precisely in order to discover some written evidence of his theory about Freud, and thereby explode the foundations of Freudian orthodoxy. In short, he was a Trojan Horse. But it can’t be said that he was a particularly damaging one. Well within the year of his contract, he showed his cards — to a reporter for the Times, no less — and was unceremoniously kicked out, without having found anything. As McGuffins go, Freud’s ideas about the unconscious are as good as any. Malcolm manages to discuss them without sharing her own views about Freud, but her withholding is too ostentatious to be overlooked, and we’re indirectly reminded of her mordant thoughts about writerly objectivity.
But this is not just a tale of intramural feuds. In the middle section of the book, Malcolm turns her attention to a young man who has the paradoxical effect of making everyone else in the story look simultaneously normal and crazy. As he puts it himself, Peter Swales is a resident alien in the world of learning. A self-taught historian, without so much as a college degree, Swales latched onto Freud after working with a professor of psychopharmacology on a book about Freud’s interest in cocaine. “Working with” was not something that Swales tended to do for very long, however, and soon Swales was working on his own book about Freud and cocaine. He became an avid student of materials relating to the gestation of Freud’s psychoanalytic propositions. When his path crossed Eissler’s — Eissler, then director of the Freud Archives, controlled access to certain letters that Swales wanted to read — it was not as an analyst or even as a psychologist that Swales introduced himself. He was an intellectual historian, searching for the roots of ideas. This hardly made him ipso facto welcome to an institution that but closely trails the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Scientology in discouraging free exploration of its origins, but Eissler — never the Menschenkenner — was wowed by Swales’s work so far, and took the trouble to secure him a modest grant.
In the end, Swales turns out to have the usual defects of the autodidact. His doubts and his credulities alike are settled, and never subjected to the critical review with which Swales evaluates his evidence. His method is plodding and inexorable but also stubborn, with results therefore prone to what Malcolm calls “fantastical allegation.” But he has a voice that, as recorded by Malcolm’s tapes, shows a real gift for the English language, specifically for being dogged without being tedious. My favorite moment is Swales’s account of his role in the fracas that brought Masson down. Swales, having fallen out with Massoon, wrote a 45-page letter, addressed to Masson but circulated openly, in which he retailed the myriad ways in which Masson had disappointed him and, into the bargain, displayed shoddy habits of scholarship. (Malcolm insists that this tirade is “unfailingly interesting.”) The letter came to the attention of Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal. Blumenthal wanted to write up some of Swales’s findings, but Swales was involved in yet another Menschenkenner-less arrangement — an exclusives deal — with a London newspaper, and couldn’t expatiate on his saucy tales about Freud the adulterer and Freud the attempted murderer. Blumenthal naturally concluded that, if he couldn’t engage the writer of the long letter, he could at least talk to its recipient. “You do what you like,” replied Swales. He goes on to tell Malcolm:
And in that moment I saw what was going to happen. Blumenthal had had the idea that Klein was an authority on what was happening in psychoanalysis, and so had Klein steer him toward the seduction theory as the center of the article. I knew that Masson wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut. Ralph Blumenthal, being a newspaper reporter, is skilled at getting people to talk, and I knew Masson would succumb to Blumenthal’s flattery. So Masson, in turn, was steered by Blumenthal to blab about the seduction theory, and my story got lost and buried, and I was thankful. I had known that Masson would sooner or later put his foot in it. I didn’t know how, but I knew the guy’s got to blunder badly and get booted out, one way or another. When Blumenthal said, ‘I’ll talk to Masson,’ I more or less knew how the rest of the scenario would go. I knew that Masson would shoot his mouth off and that Eissler would finally have to face the truth about him.
Through all of Swales’ intelligent and careful diction, it is easy to see an ongoing carnival of resentful Schadenfreude.
***
But the funniest moment in In the Freud Archive came, for me, shortly after the passage that I quoted at the top. Masson again:
Erik Erikson was teaching at Harvard when I was there, and I went to him and asked if I could go into treatment with him. My main symptom was total promiscuity — sleeping with every woman I could meet. He said no, but he sent me to someone he said he had great respect for, and I was in therapy with this man for a few years. But eight years later, when I was teaching in Toronto, I still had the symptom, so I went into therapy again, and then into five-times-a-week analysis. The trouble never seemed to get any better, and I figured it must have something to do with my childhood.
There is no further talk about “the symptom”; we never learn if Masson discovered anything about his childhood that might account for “the symptom.” By the time we turn the page, Masson has traded in his professorship of Sanskrit for training as an analyst. A few pages later, we are not surprised, not in the least, to find out that being an analyst was not something that Jeffrey Masson was cut out to do.
I was left thinking of Mrs Grimmer (Ruth Draper’s most hilarious creation) and her three chocolate eclairs.