Freudian drama puts media-speak on trial

A JURY in San Francisco will tomorrow begin the arduous task of trying to unravel an affair in which press freedom, the integrity of a distinguished magazine and one of its top writers, and the reputation of a recalcitrant academic are all at issue.

The case of Masson v Malcolm and the New Yorker has been compared to the Jarndyce v Jarndyce of Dickens's Bleak House, the marathon lawsuit that became so complex that eventually no one understood it. But it is best seen as a drama whose theme is betrayal.

At the top of the cast list is Jeffrey Masson, an outspoken Californian psychoanalyst turned author. Ten years ago, Dr Masson came to the conclusion that Sigmund Freud had gone badly astray by abandoning his 'seduction theory', which proposed that neurosis was caused by actual childhood sexual abuse (as opposed to wish-fulfilment fantasy, as Freud later maintained).

Dr Masson concluded that Freud, the founding father of his discipline, changed his views because he could not face the prospect that his peers were capable of widespread assaults on children. It was a bold attack on the great man, a rattling of the cage of orthodoxy, made even more surprising by the fact that Dr Masson was projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives at the time. He was promptly fired.

Enter Janet Malcolm, a successful writer for the New Yorker, who, not unnaturally, took an intense interest in Dr Masson's bombshell, which had profoundly shaken the world of psychoanalysis. She went to see him in Berkeley, California, and spent many hours interviewing him there and elsewhere.

Their conversations, some of which were taped - although, crucially, not all - ranged from his challenge to Freudian thought to his own libido (he says he first became interested in analysis as a means of curing his promiscuity; he claims to have slept with a thousand women before leaving graduate school).

Their dialogue went on for weeks but, in December 1983, the first of Ms Malcolm's two-part series was published. Dr Masson did not emerge as the vindicated hero that he had hoped to read about. She portrayed him as a vain, ingratiating egoistical womaniser, who telephoned her to 'crow' about the book he planned on his revelations about Freud. 'Wait till it reaches the bestseller list, and watch how the analysts will crawl,' she quotes him saying. '. . . They will say that Masson is a great scholar, a major analyst - after Freud he is the greatest analyst who ever lived.'

Not only did Dr Masson resent his portrayal, which he regarded as a betrayal of trust; he also claimed that Ms Malcolm, a respected contributor to one of the world's most respected and fastidiously edited magazines, had fabricated quotations. He was, he claims, misquoted as referring to himself as an 'intellectual gigolo' who wanted to turn Anna Freud's house in London into a place of 'sex, women and fun' - comments that do not appear on Ms Malcolm's tapes, but which she says she noted down during a conversation when her recorder was broken.

His book bombed, selling only 11,000 copies, and he came under personal attack from reviewers who appeared to have read the New Yorker. Meanwhile, Ms Malcolm reprinted her pieces in a much more successful book. He sued her for dollars 10m, alleging libel.

Dr Masson and Ms Malcolm had unwittingly provided American journalists with an experience they relished: a chance to spend a happy hour or two of their own on the psychoanalyst's couch. Is it acceptable, the pundits asked themselves, to paraphrase an interviewee as long as you retain his true meaning (as Ms Malcolm claims to have done), or must quotes contain all the 'ums and ahs', all the botched grammar and vagaries of real speech?

The case was twice dismissed by the courts, but Dr Masson pursued it to the US Supreme Court which, in 1991, finally supplied an answer. It ruled that because quotations may be 'a devastating instrument for conveying false meaning', writers do not have 'the freedom to place statements in their subjects' mouths without fear of liability'.

The court concluded that a jury would have to determine whether she had committed libel. This is what will be decided before a jury of eight in the federal trial opening tomorrow.

But there was a further, baffling twist. In 1989, Ms Malcolm wrote another article in the New Yorker, this time about a journalist called Joe McGinniss, author of Fatal Vision, a best-seller about Jeffrey McDonald, a Green Beret doctor who murdered his pregnant wife and two little girls. She accused Mr McGinniss of betraying McDonald by luring him into a trusting friendship, offering him a share of the book's earnings, then writing a damning account of his guilt.

Her peroration, which she also turned into a book, began: 'Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on, knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.'

The article caused a further uproar, and prompted speculation that Ms Malcolm was attempting to make amends for her treatment of Dr Masson, or even engaging in her own bizarre form of confessional psychoanalysis - an interpretation that she denies. Whether her words return to haunt her will soon be known. She must now hope that they are not as memorable as she once intended them to be.

(Photograph omitted)