Her Father's Daughter: Anna and the Freud Scholar

This post is dedicated to an unnamed federal official. By order of the U.S. Department of Justice I can't disclose the official's name.

In 1980, I met with Anna Freud and Dr. K. R. Eissler, the head of the Sigmund Freud Archives and Anna Freud's trusted adviser and friend, in London, and Miss Freud agreed to a new edition of the . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . Freud . . .
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
. . . archival collection . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
—including . . .
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
. . . the unpublished letters between Sigmund Freud and his best, perhaps his only, friend, Wilhelm Fliess.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
It took more than a year of cajoling and persuading to convince . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
. . . the Freud Archives . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . officials to cooperate with me.
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
As a result I was given access to this sealed correspondence (the originals are in the Library of Congress), which constitutes our most important source of information concerning the beginnings of psychoanalysis.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I was editor-in-chief of an elaborate series of translations of Freud's unpublished letters that were to be published by Harvard University Press in the coming years. My daily life consisted in talking to people around the world who would work on these editions, in finding letters still missing (which involved, to my pleasure, a great deal of travel), in frequent trips to the Library of Congress, almost daily conversations with Kurt Eissler, a large correspondence, and of course my own research.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
And so . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
. . . the inner circle of psychoanalysis . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . lifted its veil of secrecy ever so slightly, in a rare attempt to justify its actions to the public.
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
As I was reading through the correspondence and preparing the annotations for the first volume of the series, the Freud-Fliess letters, I began to notice what appeared to be a pattern in the omissions made by Anna Freud in the original, abridged edition. In the letters written after September 1897 (when Freud was supposed to have given up his "seduction" theory), all the case histories dealing with the sexual seduction of children had been excised. Moreover, every mention of Emma Eckstein, an early patient of Freud's and Fliess's, who seemed connected in some way with the seduction theory, had been deleted. I was particularly struck by a section of a letter written in December 1897 that brought to light two facts previously unknown: Emma Eckstein was herself seeing patients in analysis (presumably under Freud's supervision); and Freud was inclined to give credence, once again, to the seduction theory.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
All that had been suppressed and edited out reappeared . . .
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
. . . as clear, as transparent as . . .
Alexandre Dumas, Ten Years Later.
. . . objective.
Paul Wienpahl, On Translating Spinoza.
I asked Anna Freud why she had deleted this section from the letter. She said that she no longer knew why.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
A masterpiece of evasion.
Don Delillo, The Names.
It was while she held a photograph . . .
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day.
. . . of Emma Eckstein . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . in her hands that she exclaimed, impulsively, if incongruously:
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day.
It never occurred to me to know more.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Modern English Version).
When I showed her an unpublished letter from Freud to Emma Eckstein, she said that she could well understand my interest, since Emma Eckstein had indeed been important to the early history of psychoanalysis, but the letter should nevertheless not be published. In subsequent conversations, Miss Freud indicated that since her father had eventually abandoned the seduction theory, it would only prove confusing to readers to be exposed to his early hesitations and doubts. I, on the other hand, felt that these passages not only were of great historical importance but might well represent the truth. Nobody, it seemed to me, had the right to decide for others, by altering the record, what was truth and what was error. Moreover, whatever Freud's ultimate decision, it is my belief that he was haunted by the seduction theory all his life.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
The question . . .
Emile Zola, Germinal.
. . . of child sexual abuse, . . .
Robert A. Phillips, Jr., Introduction to Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls.
. . . I was sure . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . continued to trouble him, though he had supposedly, with scientific smugness, settled it.
Emile Zola, Germinal.
There exists, as far as I know (I looked without success), not a single published account of the devastating effects of incest or childhood sexual abuse before Freud’s time. And yet if this was happening to anything like the extent that is true today—and why should it be any different?—then at least one in three women, possibly more, in the general population had been exposed to a forced and unwanted sexual advance during childhood. In other words, sexual abuse of one form or another was the core trauma of many women’s lives, yet there was total silence about it.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
In the tradition we are dealing with, . . .
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
. . . one was allowed . . .
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
. . . to perform these acts but not to speak of them.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
There was no taboo on the commission of incest, only a taboo on speaking about incest.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
As a scientist . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . had an almost unique opportunity.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Here was a man, possibly the first in recorded history, who heard about the sexual abuse of children and recognized what it really meant.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
At that time, had one man put up a fight, it would have had wide repercussions.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
For Freud to have broken that taboo of silence was, to my mind, one of the great moments of history.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
And yet—
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Later, in one of the most famous retractions in the history of ideas, Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . contrary to the truth . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
. . . had recanted.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
As he put it in 1925 in An Autobiographical Study: “I was at last obliged to recognize that the scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.”
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Freud’s earliest insights . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
. . . about child abuse . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . would only reemerge much later, provoking a host of other episodes.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
I showed Miss Freud the 1932 correspondence I found in Freud's desk concerning Ferenczi's last letter, which dealt with this very topic. Clearly, I thought, it was her father's continued preoccupation with the seduction theory that explained his turning away from Ferenczi.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
Most of the items brought silence.
Don Delillo, The Names.
After Fliess, Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933) was for more than twenty years Freud's closest analytic friend (Freud often addressed him as "dear son"). Until the last years of his life, Ferenczi was a loyal pupil, loved by many analysts, a constant source of papers, ideas, encouragement, and inspiration to younger analysts. But in the last few years of his life, Ferenczi began developing in a direction that alarmed Freud. In a series of three papers that uncannily parallel Freud's three 1896 papers, Ferenczi began to believe more and more strongly that the source of neurosis lay in sexual seductions suffered by children at the hands of those closest to them. . . .

Ferenczi had returned to Freud's earliest insights, while putting a different interpretation on many later analytic concepts. For example, he maintained (July 24, 1932) that the Oedipus complex could well be "the result of real acts on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward the child, who then develops a fixation, not from desire [as Freud maintained], but from fear. 'My mother and father will kill me if I don't love them, and identify with their wishes.'"
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
His aim was a human nature reconciled to itself, that did not depend on illusion.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
The paper he read before the 12th International Psychoanalytic Congress is a somewhat milder distillation of these views. Yet the ideas he expressed in the paper met with the strongest disapproval by every leading analyst of the day. Ferenczi's tenacious insistence on the truth of what his patients told him would cost him the friendship of Freud and almost all his colleagues and leave him in an isolation from which he would never emerge.
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
And now what kind of truth was I stalking?
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
Miss Freud, who was very fond of Ferenczi, found . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . several papers . . .
Joseph Conrad, Chance.
. . . in her father’s . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . desk . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . concerning . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . Ferenczi’s . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . last letter . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady.
. . . painful reading and asked me not to publish them. But I insisted that the theory was not one that Freud had dismissed lightly as an early and insignificant error, as we had been led to believe.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I thought the final argument was the coup de gr­ace—the killer point that she couldn't counter. Instead . . .
George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education.
She would insist that nothing of significance had been omitted, and when I tried to argue she would become upset.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
No real answers were forthcoming . . .
The Watergate Hearings: Break-in and Cover-Up.
She and I said nothing . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . further . . .
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
. . . to each other about the
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . issue.
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
It was coded matter. It was matter we could refer to only within the limits of a practiced look. Even this became too much.
Don Delillo, The Names.
For a psychoanalyst, she was remarkably closed on many issues that one would expect her to be open to.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
I was trying to be perceptive about her . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . but I remember thinking at the time . . .
Stewart Edward White, Arizona Nights.
—canny therapist that she is—
Striking Silence. Film Critic James Harvey Explores the Singular Landscape of PARSIFAL.
. . . she will remain . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . evasive and distant.
Irvin Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
She hated the feeling that someone knew her mind.
Don Delillo, The Names.
Central Casting would have made her the librarian of a New England Christian Science reading room. She was a small, fine-featured, quiet, thoughtfully intelligent, generous . . .
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
. . . lady with . . .
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.
. . . a purity of purpose, a holiness to her devotion that gave off a whiff of religious piety. I did not find it attractive, but it was genuine, and I was impressed. I don't think she invented this trait, either. I am sure she got it from her father, who of course was entirely consumed with holy zeal for the cause. Her father's legacy lay heavy on her shoulders . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Woe to any truth-seeker who endangered it.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
Of course, she was curious about his actions and correspondence. But . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
Her unquestioning loyalty made it impossible to deal with events on their basic, real level, he thought. Her stubbornness was difficult to contend with. At times he imagined her as the heroine of a movie, the devoted daughter defending her embattled, innocent father.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
For her . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . her father . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday—nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time—his death and her sorrow—I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together—I heard them together.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Here in this house . . .
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
. . . in London, . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . Between one June and another September . . .
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
. . . Freud lived out the year he still had to live . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . extremely ill; . . .
Henry James, The Chaperon.
. . . an exile, . . .
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Excerpt from Evangeline.
. . . alone in an alien culture.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (Explanatory Note by T.J. Reed).
What images return
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
June
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters.
crossing the Channel
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
through the fog
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
by the night boat
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
water lapping the bow
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
Then, land!—then England!
Elizabeth Barret Browning, Aurora Leigh.
reaching the other shore
Commentary on the Diamond Sutra.
the first eight weeks of freedom
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
June, May . . . April . . . February . . . November
Simon Gray, Butley.
September
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
this long disease
Simon Gray, Butley.
his daughter Anna,
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
Freud, Living and Dying
Max Schur, Freud, Living and Dying.
—his death and her sorrow—
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
the final summons
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans.
What is it—what?’
Robert Frost, Excerpt from Home Burial.
My daughter.
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
“—and the doctor.”
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
his loyal and loving physician
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
the morphine
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
Freud’s end as a stoic suicide
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
syringes and needles
Alan Dershowitz, Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case.
the portal where they came
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II) (Final Scene).
this last of meeting places
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from The Hollow Men.
The pulse in the arm, less strong and
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
his last words
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady.
the words of bliss, the sentence,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II) (Final Scene).
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
My hope
Henry James, The Aspern Papers.
My daughter.
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
And now, in this house, . . .
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Anna Freud—
Robert Coles, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis.
. . . who was . . .
Alice Sokoloff, Cosima Wagner: Extraordinary Daughter of Franz Liszt.
. . . inordinately proud of being her father’s daughter . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . listened in stony silence while I painted a marvelous mural of all the hidden truths coming to light; doors being unlocked, things falling into place.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
She seemed staggered by my confrontation and retreated by sinking into her body.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
I told myself that the road ahead would be hard.
Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin.
The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him. There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope for the end of man is to know.
Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men.
But there is more than this.
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
There was . . .
David Evanier, The Man Who Refused to Watch the Academy Awards.
. . . I now began to see . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the chance to be an actor in a drama of historical importance.
K.R. Eissler, Crusaders.
I found myself, after years of comparatively unproductive labor, on the threshold of what might prove to be a magnificent discovery.
Howard Carter and A.C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
It is hard for me to convey the excitement . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the fever of suspense, the almost overmastering impulse, born of curiosity, to break down seals and lift the lids of boxes, the thought—pure joy to the investigator—that you are about to add a page to history, the strained expectancy—why not confess it?—of the treasure-seeker.
Howard Carter and A.C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
There were puzzles everywhere, and not unimportant ones. Why did Freud keep a whole packet of Ferenczi material, all connected with Ferenczi's views about childhood seduction, in the top middle drawer of his desk? Why was it so important to him? Or had somebody else put it there? Who?
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
The cache of letters had lain unnoticed in a locked drawer of a battered wooden box that . . .
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
. . . looked . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . like the slanted top of a lectern.
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
A puzzlement.
Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers, The King and I.
How did they end up in that wooden box, which apparently . . .
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
. . . dated . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . from around 1900?
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
I, of course, kept my reverie to myself.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
At times . . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries, not fit for a human being to behold.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
One day Anna Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . motioned me to a chair. We sat down.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
It had become very still—
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw.
I laid the packet . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . of material . . .
Jack London, Grit of Women.
. . . I had found . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . gently on the little table, and she put her hand over it . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
And then, as he was silent, she . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . said something in German . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
. . . in tones so clear and evenly-pitched that each separate syllable tapped like a little hammer on his brain:
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
“Herr Doktor, . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
Um Gott, was klagest du mich an? War ich es, die dir Leid gebracht?
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
Dr. Masson take note!
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . Mein Vater . . .
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
(Whenever she used that phrase "my father" I would shudder a bit at its historic magic—knowing, too, that in just a few years, nobody else would ever be able to say that again . . . )
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . my father . . .
Anna Freud, On Losing and Being Lost.
. . . based his rejection of these women's memories on clinical material. He recanted because he was wrong the first time."
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
" . . . I am proud to know I understood him better than anyone on earth—he told me so himself. . . ."
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
"Is that not plain enough for you, Dr. Masson?"
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Anna Freud urged me to . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . begin anew, make a new start . . .
Langenscheidt’s German-English/English-German Dictionary.
But over all else . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
Anna Freud urged me to direct my interests elsewhere.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I wanted to get inside her, see myself through her, learn the things she knew.
Don Delillo, The Names.
That, of course, was futile.
Zane Grey, The Gold Desert.
She spoke faster, more expressively. Blood vessels flared in her eyes and face. I began to detect a cadence, a measured beat. She . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
. . . held out as firmly as ever . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . in defense of her . . .
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
. . . dear father
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
At the same time, she started to make gestures as if she were bored, gave evidence of some restlessness, and looked repeatedly at her watch.
Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.
I began to suspect that there were a lot of secrets I was not to know about.
Gottfried Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy.
The uneasy thought came to him that perhaps . . .
W. Somerset Maugham, A Man with a Conscience.
. . . somewhere . . .
Emile Zola, The Debacle.
. . . contained in those papers . . .
Foster W. Cline, An Essay on Dreaming.
. . . somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about.
Alfred Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt.
He tried to persuade himself that what was done was done and that he had really not been a free agent, but he could not quite still the prickings of his conscience.
W. Somerset Maugham, A Man with a Conscience.
I decided that the best step would be for me to get an outside opinion . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
But . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
Where should he go? Whom could he ask?
Emile Zola, The Debacle.
In conversations with other analysts close to the Freud family, I was given to understand that I had stumbled upon something that was better left alone.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
Some added—
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
" . . . Everything is treated like a secret over there. Everything."
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
I knew I was taking a risk.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
(This was made even more apparent when my connections with the Freud Archives were suddenly terminated).
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.