Excerpts From: The Assault On Truth...

By Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson

P.48 "The child who lived in mortal fear and dared not speak was branded a liar. "
"It is as if Garnier were saying: What Camille tells us could not possibly be true and if it is true, then she has no business telling it to us. Either way, (emphasis mine, PL) she is crazy."

P.68 "Freud has already begun to represent to Fleiss and to himself that Emma Eckstein's problems originated with her and not in the external world." (despite concrete evidence to the contrary-PL)" Freud had begun to explain away his own bad conscience."

P.100 "Freud told Fleiss that he had found a completely surprising explanation of Eckstein's hemorrhages...I shall be able to prove to you that you were right, that her episodes of bleeding" (from Fleiss's surgical errors-PL) " were hysterical, were occasioned by longing, and occurred at the sexually relevant times...(female cycle but out her nose! PL)

P.102 "Freud is eager to supply Fleiss with the dates that would finally absolve him of any responsibility of Emma Eckstein's bleeding. It has begun to take on connotations of fantasy; it is connected with 'wish fulfillment,' not just with real events. The shift will soon be completed."

P132 "Strange that it never occurs to Abraham to seek another explanation for her (a child of nine raped by a neighbour PL) secrecy. Perhaps the child feared her parents would have taken her confession as a fantasy and beaten her for inventing stories.

If this is the 'last word' as Freud says, then it is a frightening one. To tell someone who has suffered the effects of a childhood filled with sexual violence that it does not matter whether his memories are anchored in reality or not is to do further violence to that person...A real memory demands some sort of validation from the outside world- denial of those memories by others can lead to a break with reality, and a psychosis."

P.157 "Moreover, he (Sandor Ferenczi) noticed that his patients were very sensitive to this hypocrisy, and try as he might to conceal his feelings, patients invariably incovered them...He specualtes on why his patients were so sensitive to issues of truth and honesty."

P.182 " Freud then diagnoses his colleague Ferenczi with 'psuedologia phantastica,' invention of experiences that are just fairy tales."
Masson: Freud is stating that Frenczi's belief in the reality of (his patients) memories of childhood trauma demonstrates that he (Ferenczi-PL) suffers from this 'disease.'...
Masson: Freud could not know whether ferenczi's patients 'imagined' theri traumas, any more than he could know whether ferenczi imagined his trauma."
Ferenczi has stated: The most important thing was to keep up appearances, to keep 'evil habits' hidden away."

...." whenever a patient tells of something inherently repulsive or upsetting ( to the physician's idea of social order) that 'story' is attributable to a disease....On 'telepathy' Ferenczi assesses 'mediums'....To protect themselves they learned to see what other people avoided seeing..."
"...and that it was incumbent upon analysts to find some means of dealing with such suffering instead of denying it."
Masson: He (Ferenczi) was considered paranoid. It was a high price to pay for telling the truth.

On Freud's Existential Shift:
"No doubt he believed he was doing the right thing, and the difficult thing, when he shifted his attention from external trauma to internal fantasy as the causitive agent in mental illness but that does not mean it represents the truth.
".....the analyst who sees such a patient is trained to believe that her memories are fantasies. As such, the analyst, no matter how benevolent otherwise, does violence to the inner life of his patient and is in covert collusion with what made her ill in the first place. In such an atmosphere, treatment could be "successful" only if the patient suppressed her own knowledge of her past and began to believe with the analyst..."
"...to become healthy, the patient would have to come to share the view of the analyst...This would involve denying the patient's very self.....It spells the death of the patient's independence and freedom.