Although Janet Malcolm is known to have had difficulties with her tape-recorder,
she reports several events (pp. 44-68) to which there were many other witnesses
who have never challenged her report of these events.  These events have a
bearing on my disagreement with Andrew Brook over 1) the important theoretical
issue raised by the Masson controversy and 2) why analysts at a certain point in
history openly responded to Masson's charges.  My claim is that public debate of
a new idea in psychoanalysis only occurs when the establishment is forced to
acknowledge its existence, which in the case of Masson occurred after the
publication of the New York Times articles in August 1981. Malcolm reads one of
Masson's papers and says, "While Masson spoke on the telephone, I pondered an
incongruity that had struck me the night before" i.e. The paper was "respectful
of psychoanalysis and of Freud, and its tone was scholarly and fairly quiet.
Here and there in it, Masson would lapse into a kind of boyishness he is prone
to, but on the whole the paper was as sober, and even, in places, as tedious, as
the general run of psychoanalytic papers.  The bulk of it was devoted to an
extravagantly admiring discussion of Freud's 1896 paper on the seduction
theory." Masson says, "The paper was very scholarly, and I thought analysts
would be fascinated by my discoveries and would receive them with great warmth.
But something causes analysts to ignore my material and to focus on me.  Every
time I give a paper, someone gets up and says, 'I'm not interested in that
paper, I'm not interested in your findings, I'm interested in you,' and they
come out with some really cheap parlor analysis."
 
Masson's statement reminds me of how I felt when I first believed I had a good
theoretical idea.  I was totally unprepared for the kind of closed-minded
responses I would receive from journal reviewers.  In my opinion, these
responses are powerful evidence for the closed mind of the establishment, but
the evidence I emphasize is public and accessible to any interested listmember.
I hope they will read Malcolm's book.