Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is 83.  He trained as a psychoanalyst in Toronto from 1971-1979, while he was professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto.  When he finished his training Kurt Eiisller asked him to be the projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives. He gave up his professorship and planned to move to London, to live in the Freud house and turn it into a research center.  After several meetings in London, Anna Freud gave Masson the unpublished Freud/Fliess letters, with permission to publish them.  He was also made director of the Freud Copyright.  All this fell apart when Masson turned up material about the sexual abuse of children in Freud’s letters that cast doubt on the traditional history of how Freud changed his mind about such abuse (first believing it to be real, and then deciding on somewhat obscure grounds that it was merely fantasy).

When two articles about Masson’s research appeared in the New York Times, the analytic world was deeply upset:  Eissler fired Masson from the Archives; the Toronto Institute took away his licence to practice analysis; he was fired from the Freud Copyright, but, Anna Freud stuck with her promise that he could publish all the material he had found in her home, including the complete letters of Freud to Fliess (published in 1985 by Harvard University Press).  When his book, The Assault on Truth:  Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory came out in 1984, he was deemed persona non grata in analytic circles.

Jeffrey turned to writing about the emotional lives of animals and had two New York Times bestsellers When Elephants Weep and Dogs Never Lie about Love.  He continued to write about animals and other topics (31 books in total).  He now lives in Sydney with Leila Masson, an integrative paediatrician.  Their son Manu works for Atlassian and their son Ilan is a permanent official of the EU in Brussels. He has a daughter from a previous marriage, Simone, who is a nurse practitioner in Northampton, USA where she runs a memory clinic.  Masson is a citizen of the USA, New Zealand, and is awaiting his Australian citizenship.