Dear Mr. Knock,
I think you msg was intended for Robert White. But as I am mentioned in
passing from an earlier post, perhaps its apporpriate I also reply.
>>>What justification do you see in the "embargo"?
The embargo on many of Freud's letters, and those of some of his
correspondents, originated from a time when patients and their relatives who
might still have been alive could be identified. The embargo served to
protect their identities from a prying public. That condition clearly no
longer obtains, and an embargo on those grounds is unjustified. It was also
felt in some quarters, and by the young Kurt Eissler, that the climate in
the immediate aftermath of Freud's death was not a suitable one for the
writing of objective histories, and he may have feared a revisionist attack
upon his cherished idol (that situation has, nonetheless come to pass in the
late 80s and 90s). To this day certain letters, or often only certain lines
from letters, have continued to be embargoed because they cast Freud, his
thought and his actions, in a light other than that for which the keepers of
the flame, so to speak, but primarily Anna Freud and the older Kurt Eissler
respecting her wishes after her demise, intended.
However, it now appears that, under much pressure and criticism from a wave
of revisionist scholars from the 80s onwards, Eissler has had a change of
heart and has softened to the idea that all of Freud's letters should be
made generally available. Once this has occurred it will no doubt transpire
that our understanding of Freud and his place in history will be
irredemiably altered, as might the very core of psychoanalytic theory itself.
>>>If you were to speculate about the highest justification for the
>>>"embargo", what would it be?
See above.
>>>Is Masson's veracity questioned because of his position as an iconoclast
>>>or because of his reprehensable personal conduct?
I suspect the latter. By all accounts he is a very bright, engaging man who
exercised his considerable charm to secure a favoured position within the
Freud flame-keeper hierarchy. He became the Freud archivist, had unlimited
access to all of Freud's letters that were deposited there, an intense
curiosity, and was a voracious reader. He stumbled across some letters which
*then* (ie. circa 1980) had not been published and I suspect, rather hastily
concluded that Freud was guilty of a deliberate cover up and published a
book setting out his claims. (America was just getting over Watergate so
"cover-up" might still have been an attractive/revolting idea).
>>>Why will his comments be a "thorn" in our sides?
>>Are his statements so >disturbing?
I don't think so. His thesis grabbed the public imagination (or perhaps it
was just very clever straetgic marketing, cashing in, as I say, on the
immediate post-Watergate era) but it required a reasoned and reasonable
response from the community of Freud scholars which, in several places, it
has had. (See also Peter Gay's biography).
Geoffrey Blowers
Associate Professor
Dept of Psychology
University of Hong Kong
Tel: (852)-2859-2378(O) (852-2517-1885(H)
Fax: (852)-2858-3518
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
website: http://www.hku.hk/psychodp/blowers.html
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