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This is not an exposé but a personal account of the author's experiences with psychoanalysis as a discipline and with its practice. It betrays no bitterness but rather disbelief and disenchantment about all that Masson came in contact at different levels of the psychoanalytic world. Although Masson specifically reports on the International Psychoanalytic Association, there is no reason to doubt that similar events may not occur in other analytic groups. Two distinct sections make up this book, the first part constituted by the first five chapters and the second by the four remaining chapters. In the first part, Masson narrates his experience as a psychoanalytic candidate during his training analysis. How nice it would be if he were talking about an idiosyncratic experience; he is not. Masson speaks for many, in psychoanalytic education in general and in the so-called training analysis in particular. Very few have had the courage to reveal the naked truth about these matters before; those who have dared have been excommunicated. In certain isolated instances, serious questions about the authenticity of the training analysis have been raised before without any significant consequences; reading this book stimulates a reexamination of these fundamental issues.
The second part deals with Masson's rising in and falling from the psychoanalytic circles of power; this section has a different tempo and dramatic and tragic undertones. Although most readers may know the sad end of Masson's story, here he gives the account of the events that brought about his falling from grace at the psychoanalytic pinnacle; this part of the book is gripping and illuminating about how power is wielded and abused in the higher analytic circles. Many may feel disgusted if not nauseated about the told practices; what becomes progressively clear is that there is one doctrine for the “public” or the “initiated” and other tenets and practices for the “insiders” or “priests.” The hypocrisy and duplicit