To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Item: Masson asserts his disdain for theory, but what really comes through in the interview is an ignorance of key ideas in psychoanalysis. A theory of the unconscious is at the heart of psychoanalysis; this theory is based on the idea that all people (N.B., black and white, as well as Jew and German) have an unconscious that “contains” residues of repressed infantile sexual longings. The therapist is primarily concerned with the structure of the unconscious, not with the experiences that impinged upon it, just as an orthopedic surgeon has to be more informed on the nature of kneecaps than on the details of activities (ballet, football, etc.) that affected them. Masson is perfectly free to argue that this is a nonsensical theory, but at least he should be clear on what it states.
Item: It is quite sloppy to blame Freud or psychoanalysis in general for the (indeed inexcusable) link between Jung and the Nazis, or for lobotomies, or for the mistreatment of psychiatric patients. Certainly Masson should know better than to permit the interviewer to slur over the boundaries between analytically based therapies and the questionable practices used by some psychiatrists in situations in which the patients are involuntarily confined and powerless; classical therapy has always insisted on a voluntary relationship with an informed patient who realizes that there are no miracle cures, only increased insight.
Timothy Beneke replies:
