Autorentext

Masson has had at least four lives: first as a boy raised to become a "spiritual leader" (see his denunciation of such a life in My Father's Guru). While in the middle of his disillusion, he became a professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto. At the same time he trained to become a Freudian analyst. Upon graduation he became Projects Director of the Freud Archives, and was scheduled to move into Freud's house in London when fate intervened: Masson found documents which seemed to show that Freud was right in believing that many women had been sexually abused as children, and that he was wrong to give up this belief, perhaps impelled by societal displeasure at his discoveries. Saying this publicly turned Masson into a psychoanalytic pariah, and he gave up both his professorship and his analytic career to delve into the far more fascinating world of animal emotions. Two of his books, WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP and DOGS NEVER LIE ABOUT LOVE, were New York Times best-sellers. He lived on a beach in New Zealand with his two sons, Ilan and Manu, and his German wife, Leila, a pediatrician who works with children on the autistic spectrum (using the bio-medical approach), Benjy, a golden lab, and three cats for 14 years. They moved to Europe (Malaga and Berlin) and are now living in Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. They often travel to the States to see their grandchild, and Europe to see Leila's family.

Klappentext

The bestseller that reopened one of psychology’s deepest wounds.

For generations, Sigmund Freud’s legacy has shaped how we understand memory, trauma, desire, and the human mind. But what if one of the founding stories of psychoanalysis left out the voices that mattered most?

In The Assault on Truth, New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson revisits Freud’s early work with patients who described childhood sexual abuse, and the moment Freud turned away from what they told him. Drawing on letters, case histories, medical records, and long-suppressed evidence, Masson asks why those accounts were recast as fantasy, and what that decision cost generations of survivors.

This is the bestselling, much-discussed book that challenged the psychoanalytic establishment and sparked a fierce public debate about trauma, memory, power, and whose truth gets believed. Urgent, provocative, and deeply researched, The Assault on Truth remains essential reading for anyone interested in Freud, psychology, and the lasting consequences of disbelief.

What happens when the people meant to listen decide not to believe?