Sigmund Freud Archives

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Sigmund Freud Archives mainly consist of a trove of documents housed at the US Library of Congress ^[1] and in the former residence of Sigmund Freud during the last year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens in northwest London. They were at the center of a rather complicated scandal which is described in Janet Malcolm's book, Inside the Freud Archives.

After World War II Dr. Kurt Eissler (1909-1999) and a small group of psychoanalysts who knew Sigmund Freud personally, including Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Bertram Lewin and Herman Nunberg, decided to preserve Freud's letters and papers in a single archive. The Library of Congress, Dr. Eissler wrote, agreed in a legal "instrument" to accept as a donation all documents collected by the Archives, and to make them accessible to scholars. By the 1980's Dr. Eissler, with the help of Anna Freud, had collected thousands of tapes, letters and papers for that archive. (An exhibition of parts of the collection was held at the Library of Congress last year and will be at the Jewish Museum this year.) ^[2]

The Archives were founded in 1951 by Dr. Eissler and directed by him for decades. Dr. Eissler prevented many well-meaning scholars from seeing many Freud doucments claiming confidentiality, even when their donors had not requested nor demanded that confidentiality, nor was anyone a potential victim of the revelation of those documents. In 1974 the 65-year-old Dr. Eissler met Dr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (born 1941), a 33-year-old Sanskrit scholar and psychoanalyst, at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Eissler took a liking to Masson, appointed him his secretary, and meant to make him his successor at the Archives. In 1981 Dr. Masson, who was then the Projects Director of the Archives, delivered a paper to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society in New Haven, Connecticut. Dr. Masson said that Freud had abandoned his seduction theory -- the idea that adult neurosis is caused by childhood sexual abuse -- for personal rather than scientific reasons. By dropping the seduction theory, Dr. Masson concluded, "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." Dr. Eissler was deeply shocked and sought to dismiss Dr. Masson from his job at the Archives, which led to bilateral legal action and a well-publicized scandal.

The current director of the Archives is Dr. Harold P. Blum, a well-known psychoanalyst and scholar.

1 Literature
2 Also see
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Literature

Janet Malcolm: In the Freud Archives, New York, Knopf, 1984, ISBN 0394538692. Paperback edition, New York, Vintage Books, 1985, ISBN 0394729226. British edition, London, Papermac, 1997, ISBN 0333644719. New edition, with an afterword by the author, New York, New York Review Books, 2002, ISBN 159017027X.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson: The assault on truth : Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984, ISBN 0374106428.
Sarah Boxer: Kurt Eissler, 90, Director Of Sigmund Freud Archives. The New York Times, Obituary, February 20, 1999.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson: Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of A Psychoanalyst. Reading, Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley, 1990, ISBN 020152368X. Paperback edition, New York, Ballantine Books, 2003, ISBN 034545278X, GTIN 9780345452788.