Freud is a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations: this is a psychical need which, in my opinion, leads to excessive generalization.
—Josef Breuer, 1907 (Cranefield, 320)[1]

For many connoisseurs of high-level gossip, irony, and scandal, some of the brightest moments of 1983 were provided by Janet Malcolm’s spellbinding articles in The New Yorker entitled “Trouble in the Archives.” The articles dealt with the uproar surrounding the firing of Jeffrey Masson as Projects Director of the Freud Archives, an important collection that has been largely restricted from scholars’ view in the Library of Congress for periods extending as far ahead as the year 2102. As Malcolm related, Masson, a brash, newly accredited lay analyst, had made himself something of a Trojan horse within that citadel. Dr. Kurt Eissler, the venerable guardian of the Archives and Freud idolater extraordinaire, had been smitten by the glib and cunning Masson, and on Eissler’s advice the late Anna Freud had permitted Masson to inspect documents in her own possession that seemed to contradict received views about the early Freud. Malcolm fashioned an intriguing narrative out of Eissler’s paternal doting upon Masson and their subsequent falling out over Masson’s unsanctioned broadcasting of his new heterodoxy. And in her second article she trumped her portrait of Masson with an even more unlikely figure, Masson’s nemesis, Peter Swales—a high-school dropout, a veteran of the rock music and drug cultures, and a self-made Freud scholar of colossal pretensions whose crude attempts to