Word: freuds
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AFTER DRAWING attention to his discovery. Masson quickly fell from grace among Freud's Toronto disciples. He was abruptly dismissed from his post, his critics claiming Masson had publicizd his opinions prematurely and in a flamboyant manner. Typically, Masson rebelled...
Books which tell us that the work of the intellectual pioneers that we have come to idolize was actually fundamentally flawed seem to be in vogue recently, so it was probably only a matter of time before someone questioned the central tenets of the theories of Sigmund Freud. Yet even for such a strongly iconoclastic work, Jeffrey M. Masson's The Assault on Truth Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory has received a tremendous amount of pre-publication publicity, most of it negative...
...book which is surprisingly interesting and readable, given its heavy documentation. Masson attempts to show why Freud abandoned his earlier seduction theory in favor of theories which emphasized the role of fantasies in producing neuroses. In 1896, a controversial paper Freud called "the Aetiology of Hysteria" proposed that childhood "seduction" was the root cause of most human problems in later life. This interpretation was criticized by other psychiatrists, and ten years later Freud renounced his seduction theory. Traditional psychoanalytic history holds that this abandonment was necessary for the development of Freud's pathbreaking theories of the Oedipus complex and infantile...
...Masson, however, Freud's change of belief was anything but good for psychoanalysis Indeed, Masson even writes. By shitting the emphasis from an actual world of sadnes, misery, and cruelty to an internal stage on which actors performed invented dramas for an invisible audience of their own creation. Freud began a trend away from the real world that, it seems to me, is at the root of the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis and psychiatry throughout the world." In The Assault on Truth Masson traces the circumstances and events which he believes led the young Freud away from the seduction...
...most interesting of these influences is the case history of Freud's patient Emma Eckstein. One of the first patients treated to Freud-style psychoanalysis, Emma suffered from stomach ailments and menstrual problems. Freud's closest personal and professional friend at the time was Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin physician who developed the unusual theory that sexual problems are closely linked to the nose and could be corrected by nasal surgery. After conferring, the two doctors decided that such surgery might help Emma, and early in 1895 Fliess came to Vienna to operate...