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By Jeffrey M. Masson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1984. Pp. 308.
In the Freud Archives. By Janet Malcolm. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984. Pp. 165.
J. M. Masson's The Assault on Truth, despite the sound and fury with which it appeared, has come to signify, if not nothing, then very little indeed in the estimation of its reviewers in the major English literary magazines. This review can do little to alter that critical judgment but must agree with it.
Masson's thesis is that Freud abandoned the seduction theory and replaced it with the hypothesis that, as a consequence of a precocious sexual development, little girls phantasize that they have been sexually molested by their fathers. In doing so, it is alleged, Freud deliberately suppressed his knowledge of the truth and invented a morally cosmetic theory that would protect fathers from the legitimate accusations of their daughters against them.
This thesis is defended by an argument that hobbles along with nothing better to support it than a series of material fallacies in reasoning. From the very outset we are confronted with an example of the fallacy of accent. (This error in reasoning is one of the fallacies of ambiguity: a variant which consists essentially of a selection of quotations which distorts an author's idea.) Freud's seduction theory was a theory of the aetiology of neurosis and not merely of hysteria. The theory required that obsessional as well as hysterical neuroses in men must result from seductions in childhood by their mothers (or surrogates) or by homosexual fathers. (Little girls would also be at risk with homosexual mothers.) Since neurosis is as prevalent among men as among women, the seduction theory would predict that mothers can be no more trusted with their sons than daughters with their fathers. Masson writes only of the seduction of daughters by fathers.
The fallacy of equivocation is found in Masson's use of the expression 'abandoned the seduction theory' and its