In the Freud Archives

Written and with an afterword by Janet Malcolm

In the Freud Archives tells the story of an unlikely encounter among three men: K. R. Eissler, the venerable doyen of psychoanalysis; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a flamboyant, restless forty-two-year-old Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst turned virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a mischievous thirty-five-year-old former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar. At the center of their Oedipal drama are the Sigmund Freud Archives—founded, headed, and jealously guarded by Eissler—whose sealed treasure gleams and beckons to the community of Freud scholarship as if it were the Rhine gold.

Janet Malcolm's fascinating book first appeared some twenty years ago, when it was immediately recognized as a rare and remarkable work of nonfiction. A story of infatuation and disappointment, betrayal and revenge, In the Freud Archives is essentially a comedy. But the powerful presence of Freud himself and the harsh bracing air of his ideas about unconscious life hover over the narrative and give it a tragic dimension.

Reviews

A superbly skilled portrait of a bizarre, cloistered world and the obsessed men who guard it or try to break it open. From beginning to end it has the coolly accomplished excitement of a thriller.
— Sean French, Sunday Times (London)

In this brilliant and enjoyable book, a major crisis within one of the most important systems of ideas of our century is presented in the style of a movie vehicle for Jack Nicholson.
— Anthony Quinton, Times Literary Supplement

Also see:

The Memory Wars (paperback) By Frederick C. Crews In these essays, Crews elaborates upon his belief that "the relatively patent and vulgar pseudoscience of recovered memory rests in appreciable measure on the respectable and entrenched pseudoscience of psychoanalysis."

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