Sigmund Freud Archives

History

Early history

The Archives were founded by Kurt R. Eissler in 1951, together with a group of people who knew Freud personally, including Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Bertram Lewin and Hermann Nunberg. It was directed by Eissler for decades after its founding. Eissler prevented many well-meaning scholars from seeing many Freud documents, claiming confidentiality, even when their donors had not requested nor demanded confidentiality and even when no potential victims of the revelation of those documents existed. By the 1980s, Eissler, with the help of Anna Freud, had expanded the collection to include thousands of items.

Masson controversy

Eissler was introduced to Masson in 1974. Masson was appointed secretary, and Eissler intended for Masson to succeed him as director, which he did in 1980. Being an officer of the Archives, Masson had administrative access to all its documents, and he was therefore allowed to see anything he wanted breaking the seal whenever necessary.

In 1981, Masson published a paper wherein he claimed that Freud's abandonment of his seduction theory had taken place for reasons not related to the scientific merit of the theory, namely that Freud believed that granting the truth of his female patients' claims that they had been sexually abused would risk the reputation of the emerging psychoanalytic method. Masson said that "Freud began a trend away from the real world that, it seems to me, has come to a dead halt in the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis throughout the world."

Eissler was deeply shocked ("Just today Masud Khan called me from London and asked me to dismiss you from the Archives. The board members, all of them, or at least most of them, are asking for the same."), and Masson was subsequently dismissed from his job at the Archives, whereupon followed three lawsuits and a well-publicized scandal.

Recent history

Harold P. Blum succeeded Masson and Eissler as Executive Director. He was succeeded by Louis Rose, who is the current director . The other current officers are Jennifer Stuart as President, Nellie L. Thompson as Secretary, and W. Craig Tomlinson as Treasurer.

Literature

• Janet Malcolm: In the Freud Archives, New York, Knopf, 1984, . Paperback edition, New York, Vintage Books, 1985, . British edition, London, Papermac, 1997, . New edition, with an afterword by the author, New York, New York Review Books, 2002, .
• Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson: The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984, .
• Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson: Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst. Reading, Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley, 1990, . Paperback edition, New York, Ballantine Books, 2003, , GTIN 9780345452788.

References

References

1. [https://www.loc.gov/collections/sigmund-freud-papers/about-this-collection/ Sigmund Freud Collection in the Library of Congress]
2. [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEFDB143DF933A15751C0A96F958260 Kurt Eissler, 90, Director of Sigmund Freud Archives] by Sarah Boxer, ''The New York Times'', February 20, 1999.
3. ''Assault on Truth''
4. Eissler to Masson, p. 194 of ''Final Analysis''
5. [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9400E3DA1E39F93AA35752C1A967948260 "Freud Archives Research Chief Removed in Dispute Over Yale Talk"] by Ralph Blumenthal, ''The New York Times'' November 9, 1981
6. [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/bio/blum.html Photo]
7. [http://www.freudarchives.org/ Sigmund Freud Archives]