486
PARTISAN REVIEW
Sigmund Freud Archives, masterfully related in Janet Malcolm's
New Yorker
articles, is well known . He was effectively expelled from
the psychoanalytic community for the outspoken advancement of his
heterodox views on the Freudian theory of seduction . Since then ,
Masson has been preoccupied with providing what he perceives to
be the historical and theoretical vindication of those ideas. In
The Assault on Truth
(1984),
he attacked Freud for his famous aban–
donment of the seduction hypothesis in
1897.
Exploring the origins
of adult psychoneuroses, Freud had come to believe that the actual
experiences of childhood molestations were in many cases far less
critical than the internal, "fantasized" perceptions of such events . In
Masson's mind, this shift in emphasis was not only a scientific error
of major proportions but a conscious and cowardly attempt to
camouflage the widespread occurrence of early traumatic experi–
ences . To protect adults (that is, adult men), Masson insisted, a
rampant sexual evil was literally being psychologized out of ex–
istence . The reception of Masson's work, apart from a few notices in
the radical feminist press, was resoundingly negative ; but, by all in–
dications, he has learned little from that consensus of criticism. In
his new book,
A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality, and Psychiatry in the
Nineteenth Century,
Freud-bashing has given way to a general assault
on the European medical community in the last century . Sex, crime,
and conspiracy are again at center stage, and, once again, a majority
of readers will come away with deep reservations about the intellec–
tual and scholarly credibility of the author.
A full historical study of the medical treatment of women and
children in the Victorian era would be welcome . Masson, however,
has pursued a different path. With the help of a research assistant,
he has combed through the tables of contents of the major pediatric ,
psychiatric, and gynecological journals of France and Germany for
the period
1860-1900.
He estimates that he has examined over
750
volumes of writing. From this comprehensive review, he has chosen
a series of articles - nine in all- and has translated them for us.
A Dark Science
is the result: a small compilation of case histories, con–
cerned primarily with child abuse and gynecological surgery, which
Masson presents as a kind of clinical anthology of writings in the
field. For his part, Masson has provided a thirty-page introduction
to the collection . There are no medical or historical annotations to
the texts.
In the absence of the scholarly paraphernalia that usually
guides the reader through a collection of original documents, Mas-
