It was at the Denver congress that Masson met his man. Kurt Eissler is one of the grandees of contemporary psychoanalysis, the guardian of Freud’s good name (he once wrote a review of Freud’s Collected Letters to which he gave the title ‘Mankind at Its Best’) and, more to the point, the exceedingly jealous guardian of the Freud Archives in Washington. Like Freud when he first met Jung, Eissler was enchanted by Masson. ‘He embodied all that Eissler most cherished in people: intellect, erudition, energy, zest, colour, sparkle, even a certain wildness – qualities that the early analysts evidently had in abundance but that today’s sober practitioners entirely lack.’ In his turn, Eissler, who, at the time of their first meeting, was exactly twice Masson’s age, represented everything that in a perfect life a son might want of his father; and not only did he, as Malcolm reports, love Masson ‘quite beyond all expectation’, he also promised him the freedom of the archives – which, given that Masson’s interest in analysis was almost entirely historical and that large sections of the archives are closed to everyone else, was like giving him the keys to the kingdom.
In October 1980 Masson was appointed the archives’ projects director, to the dismay of many members of the analytic community, which was by then losing confidence in him. (‘This man,’ they said, ‘is a mistake.’) Even worse, when Eissler retired Masson would be taking his place. But Eissler didn’t read the papers Masson was sending him and, it appears, didn’t listen to the things he said. In October 1981, after two articles appeared in the New York Times announcing to the world and to his unsuspecting patron that Masson had developed new and heretical ideas about Freud, his appointment was rescinded. ‘I’m going to recommend to the board that you be terminated,’ Eissler is supposed to have said: the implication being that, in ceasing to be acceptable to the family, Masson would also cease to exist – another casualty of the ancestral propensity for idealisation followed by thoughts of assassination.
In the Freud Archives was initially published in the New Yorker after Masson had been expelled from the analytic community but before the appearance of his own book, Freud: The Assault on Truth, which, he believed, would blow away the foundations of psychoanalysis. It will be like the Ford Pinto, he told Malcolm: they will have to recall every patient since 1901. But when the book came out last year, though it had many reviews, no patients were recalled and the only effect it’s likely to have is to ensure that no one else makes it into the archives for many years to come. Not even the anti-Freudians welcomed it. Frank Cioffi, for example, whose opinion of Freud could scarcely be lower, took the view that Masson had ‘achieved the remarkable feat of concocting an account … no less tendentious and unreliable than Freud’s own’. Yet for all Masson’s excesses and his wrong-headed scholarship, there is something sympathetic in what he says about psychoanalysis.
The subject of his book is the seduction theory, which Freud held between 1895 and 1897 and then dropped – in Masson’s view, suppressed. In April 1896, in a paper on ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, Freud argued that sexual abuse in infancy or early childhood was the invariable cause of the hysterical symptoms which so many 19th-century women (and some men) developed in adult life, that these experiences ‘could be reproduced through the work of psychoanalysis’, and the symptoms thus relieved. This, in brief, is the seduction theory. Its importance for Masson is that it was based on the idea that people are made ill by something that really happened to them. The paper was delivered to the members of the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology and, Freud reported to Fliess, ‘met with an icy reception from the asses’; Krafft-Ebing, who was in the chair, said that it sounded ‘like a scientific fairy tale’. At the time Freud was enraged (his colleagues, he told Fliess, could go to hell), but it wasn’t long before he, too, began to think he’d been wrong. His patients weren’t getting better, for one thing – and in those days patients were expected to get better pretty quickly.
The seduction theory eventually yielded to the theory of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex; ‘psychical reality’ took over from ‘material reality’; when patients talked about childhood seductions they were no longer thought to be talking about something that had really happened to them but about something they wished had happened. This has generally been taken to be one of the great moments in the history of psychoanalysis: a victory for common sense (it was, after all, unlikely that so many children were either assaulted by their fathers or seduced by the maid – Jocasta, as so often, barely features in the story), and one of Freud’s decisive contributions to the way we think of ourselves. Masson, however, sees it differently: ‘by shifting the emphasis from an actual world of sadness, 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.’
There are many sober, dark-suited analysts, Freudians as well as post-Freudians, who might agree with much of what is said in that sentence (provided they didn’t know it was written by Masson) without wishing to see the seduction theory brought back to life or sharing Masson’s hectic suspicion of the reasons that led Freud to ditch it. Reviewers of Masson’s book have had no difficulty in persuading their readers of the sloppiness of his research or the simple-mindedness of the conclusions he draws from it: indeed one doesn’t have to have read the whole of Freud to see that Masson got much of it wrong and that his book is chiefly interesting insofar as it constitutes another inglorious episode in the long-drawn-out family romance. It is still, however, the case that the relationship between orthodox psychoanalysis and the reality of patients’ lives is ambiguous and often unhelpful; and that when analysts say to their patients, as most of them do, ‘I’m not interested in what happened to you but in what you have made of it,’ the patients may reasonably feel that hermeneutics are not enough. As Leonard Shengold, one of the most sympathetic of the analysts Malcolm talked to, said in a paper on child abuse, ‘the patient must know what he has suffered, at whose hands, and how it has affected him.’ It’s an important point, and not exactly arcane, yet the issue is far too often evaded.
The behaviour of the analyst I used to see varied with the time of day when I saw her. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I saw her early in the morning and these ‘sessions’ were, I imagine, like everyone else’s, low-key and fairly formal. On Mondays and Fridays my appointment was at six and she was usually more friendly and forthcoming. On Wednesdays, however, I went at 6.30 or seven and often she used to make odd, disconnected remarks and sometimes her speech was slurred. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but from time to time I would nerve myself the following morning to ask her whether there’d been anything wrong the night before, to which she always responded by asking me what it was about me that caused me to find reasons for alarm in other people’s behaviour. The last time I saw her, around five o’clock in the afternoon, she was quite bananas and kept repeating questions I’d already answered. Afterwards, wanting to make my peace with psychoanalysis, I talked to other analysts, whose response was always much the same as hers. Fifteen years later someone told me what should have been clear to me at the time: that the woman was an alcoholic. If it wasn’t so easy for analysts to deny the reality of their patients’ lives (to use a phrase of Masson’s) and if this analyst’s colleagues had been less concerned to protect her and more willing to grant that patients have an important stake in their own perceptions, I might not, despite six dutiful years of analysis, have ended up with such fiercely ambivalent feelings about it. Similarly, if the keepers of the fortress were less concerned to protect Freud’s good name, to preserve the mysteriousness of his mysteries and to foreclose discussion, if, for example, their archives, like most archives, were open to scholars, Masson and others like him might not become so inflamed every time they succeed in prising away a bit of evidence that shows (or may show) that Freud was (or may have been) less
than totally perfect.
Book reviewed:
In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm
Lady Rothermere’s Fan
‘We missed you at Chantilly,’ Ann Fleming wrote to Evelyn Waugh in 1956, after she’d been to visit Diana Cooper in France. ‘Mr Gaitskell came to lunch and fell in love with Diana … He had never seen cocktails with mint in them or a magnum of pink champagne. He was very happy. I lied and told him that all the upper class were beautiful and intelligent and he must not allow his vermin to destroy them.’ Mrs Fleming wrote a great many letters to Evelyn Waugh, telling him where she’d had lunch and where she’d had supper and who’d been there and made a fool of himself. It can’t be said that there’s anything in them that the rest of the world badly needs to know; and some people might find her tone of voice offensive. On the other hand, the letters were written for Waugh and he liked them. The question that’s hard to answer is: why are we reading them now?
The Observer, who serialised the letters, described their publication as ‘the literary event of the season’, which shows a doubtful sense of what’s what. Ann Fleming was married for 12 not very happy years to Ian Fleming, with whom she’d been infatuated for most of her life. Her previous husbands, Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail, and Lord O’Neill, never counted for much, though she had had a glamorous life with Rothermere and had been in love with him for a few years when still married to O’Neill. Being in love, unlike being married, is part of having a good time – and good times are what she chiefly writes about. After a supper at Petworth where Harold Macmillan had been present, she told Waugh that ‘except for a weakness for anecdotes about the peerage, everything he said was interesting,’ but added: ‘I doubt if he would enjoy a jolly jokes evening.’ That, to the extent that it’s fair to judge from these letters, is what she liked best: jolly jokes evenings with her friends. She was witty (‘that’s the cosiest Fan tutte I’ve ever heard,’ she said after she and her friends had been listening to it round an open fire with cushions and blankets); gave good, and when she was married to Rothermere spectacular, parties and is generally remembered as the sort of woman who could create a conversational fizz.
Her friends, as one would expect, were all grand, even those who weren’t straightforwardly upper-class. On the one hand, Boofy Arran; on the other, Lord Goodman. Mark Amory inadvertently sets the scene when he says in his foreword that he’d had to tidy up her spelling because ‘she never spotted the first “a” in Isaiah.’ ‘People born in all sorts of strata of society enjoyed the fruits of success,’ Cecil Beaton wrote apropos of the party she gave to mark Cyril Connolly’s 50th birthday. ‘And no one wasted their time in banalities.’ Not everyone – especially not her husbands – could handle so much brilliance, but there was always a chance that the outsider’s bemusement would further enhance the occasion. Invited to Chatsworth for ‘a high society pheasant shoot’, she reported to Waugh that the other guests, ‘Sandyses and Radziwills’, had ‘fled to their bedchambers alarmed by Mitford and Cecil wit’. But then three of them were foreigners and the fourth ‘a humourless politician’.
Except in her letters to Fleming she doesn’t say much about herself beyond noting her often ‘sorry’ state of mind and prevailing Waugh-like animosities. The point of the letters is to broadcast the news: how everyone’s feeling (‘Cyril so down he was forced to spend ten days at the Ritz’) and behaving (‘by the time coffee appeared Randolph and Claud were unconscious beneath the table and June was uncontrollably weeping’); the effect the guests had on each other and the quality of the conversation at the various occasions she’d attended (‘Noël was making eminent playwright conversation to the leading lady … He should be used as a cabaret and not as a guest … the deserts of pomposity between the oases of wit are too vast’); the look of delight on George Wigg’s face when Debo Devonshire asked him if he would tap her telephone and the ‘terrible tension’ on Evangeline Bruce’s when her husband took up 45 minutes of dinner-party time to answer a simple political question. She enjoyed embarrassment and records with pleasure the gaffes that she and other people made (‘You know Jamaica well, is the native problem worse than in Nassau?’ the Duke of Windsor asked Lord Rothermere, when it was her lover, Fleming, who had a house there). She played on the uneasy relationship between Waugh and Cyril Connolly by reporting to one the disparaging remarks made by the other; and if times were dull invented exchanges for the sake of the discomfort they would cause, or coaxed people into saying things she would later give them reason to regret.
Waugh with mock-envy thought of her as ‘living at the centre of the political web’, but though she enjoyed the company of politicians, provided they weren’t humourless, and liked to know what was going on, she says little about events at the political centre – which would in any case have been outside her stylistic range. The rights and wrongs of Suez are not raised, nor do we know what she thought about Eden’s abrupt resignation. The Edens’ subsequent touchiness, however, is a constant cause of complaint – it was so hard to know with whom they could safely be asked to supper – and a recurrent source of amusement, as in: ‘I went to the Second Empire exhibition in Paris and by force prevented James Pope-Hennessey sending Clarissa a postcard of “La Parure du Canal de Suez”.’ (The parure in question appears to have been a collection of necklaces and brooches presented to the Empress Eugénie.) One of her best moments comes when she is telling Waugh about ‘a noisy evening with Avons and Devonshires’: ‘there was a great uproar and lots of four-letter words; Debo said to Roy Jenkins: “Can’t you stop them by saying something Labour?”’ – ‘but this,’ she says to Waugh, ‘is something Roy has never been able to do.’ There’s an interest, of course, in all this tribal chit-chat, but however stylishly done, it doesn’t exactly constitute a literary event.
Mark Amory, the editor of the letters, who was a friend of Ann Fleming’s and her literary executor, has a strong tribal sense, as his many snobbish footnotes make clear. Apart from the footnotes, which aren’t always accurate, he has written an introduction which tells the story of her life up to 1946 when the letters begin. She was born in 1913; ‘during the last of the long hot summers before the First World War’, he notes, reviving yet again the idea that the country and the weather lost their charm at the same time. (I thought the summer of 1911 was the really hot one.) Her parents were both the children of Souls, her mother a Tennant, her father a Charteris. She was brought up by her grandmothers, spent a term at Cheltenham Ladies’ College (it wasn’t a success) and a few months at the Villa Marie Antoinette in Versailles – a finishing school. In retrospect she didn’t think she’d been happy. ‘None of us,’ she said afterwards, ‘had any affection in our tempestuous childhood,’ but Amory doesn’t altogether believe this, citing the letters she wrote to her father about her pet rabbits. In 1931 she came out, went to dances, had beaux and settled into the rest of her life.
Several young men proposed to her and for no reason that anyone can now remember she said yes to Shane O’Neill, a tall young man with a job in the City, whose family, Amory reports, is ‘the most ancient in Europe that it has been possible to tabulate’. (There may be other contenders – but who’s tabulating?) At her memorial service Noel Annan told the story – it’s repeated here – of how ‘at a dance she heard O’Neill ask his partner to sit out on the stairs. “I don’t want to do that,” objected the girl, “I’ll ruin my dress.” “I don’t mind ruining my dress,” said Ann and plonked herself down beside him.’ They were married in 1932 and it wasn’t long before she was ready to ruin her dress again.
Yet the years dragged by without any harm being done to her dresses, and by 1936, she said later, she’d ‘given up all hope of falling in love’. In August 1935 she met Fleming by a swimming-pool in Le Touquet – no dice. The following August, in Austria, her luck turned. Esmond Harmsworth, the future Lord Rothermere was 38 and, according to Amory, ‘devastatingly good-looking, athletic and a sophisticated lover’. He also had a wife
and three teenage children, but they don’t feature much here. That he was a rich and powerful press tycoon was another thing which, in later accounts, Ann always played down: ‘I regarded newspapers as I did the arrival of groceries and milk and paid but little attention,’ she wrote in 1955 to her brother Hugo Charteris. For six years, so she said, she lived only for physical contact with Rothermere while, in some sense at least, being both in love with the more difficult Fleming and married to tall O’Neill. In October 1944 O’Neill was killed in Italy; and eight months later she married Rothermere. On the night before the wedding she had supper with Fleming and went for a long walk with him in the park: ‘if he had suggested marriage,’ she wrote afterwards, ‘I would have accepted.’
Had he done so, metropolitan social life might never have re covered from the war, or so Amory would have us believe. ‘With her emergence as Lady Rothermere, Ann’s life entered its most spectacular phase. She was 32. She had the money, the style and the energy to brighten the drabness that had descended on London, and set about doing so.’ These were the great party-giving years and Warwick House, where the Rothermeres lived, was ‘filled with the sound of the rich, powerful and amusing at play’. (It’s sometimes hard to resist the impulse to make disagreeable remarks about the extent to which Amory seems to wish that he too had been there.) To begin with, her guests – apart from the aristocracy who were already her friends when they weren’t her relatives – were mainly politicians and journalists, but gradually the balance shifted towards painters and writers (in the first instance, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Peter Quennell, who was known – someone had to be – as ‘Lady Rothermere’s fan’): Amory cites this as evidence of her capacity to ‘develop’, and however off-putting a notion, it may be true. Rothermere with his devastating good looks is now seen as a kind but colourless figure who was nice to her two O’Neill children but couldn’t cope with her new friends: ‘Esmond was hardly allowed to speak as they roared rude remarks past him,’ an anonymous well-wisher is quoted as saying.
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 15