Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Reading, MA:  Addison-Wesley, 1990,  212 pp., $18.95 Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson New York:  Atheneum, 1988,  xxi + 279 pp., $18.95 The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984,  xxxiii + 308 pp., $16.95

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's expulsion from the psychoanalytic establishment was a dramatic event in the worlds of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It became the center of journalistic account—In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm—originally published in The New Yorker and then as a book in 1984. I assume Malcolm's account enjoyed such popularity because it opened the curtain on the political backstage happenings of the respected institution of psychoanalysis while introducing several flamboyant characters, with Jeffrey Masson as their spearhead.

Masson filed a ten million dollar libel suit against Janet Malcolm for having misquoted him. Although the lower court did not uphold the suit, the Supreme Court has now decided to review this case, which seems to involve the limits of liberty a journalist can take.

The Assault on Truth was both the cause and the result of Masson's “excommunication.” In it he details ideas that