Jeffrey Masson Quotes

There are many people who have undergone great suffering who seem to possess knowledge of the deepest recesses of human emotion unavailable to the rest of us. They may want to impart it, but we often cannot hear. Strangely enough, farm animals strike me in the same way.

While working at Anna Freud's house, I found an unpublished letter in which he [Freud] told Fliess, less than two weeks after he gave the paper [The Aetiology of Hysteria], "I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me." Both the immediate response to the paper, and the subsequent response were ones that Freud had not anticipated: his colleagues thought he was crazy to believe his women patients. This was bound to have a disastrous impact on a young physician with a growing family, eager to open a neurological/psychiatric clinical practice. Where were his referrals to come from, if his colleagues thought he was completely daft? I made this point to Anna Freud.

Those who live with pigs often speak of them as we normally speak of dogs—intelligent, loyal, and above all, affectionate. Each one, I am continually reminded by people who know them, is a complete individual, like no other pig.

Perhaps it is possible for humans to change directions, to look at animals not as competitors or as yet another race to colonize, but as models for achieving something that has eluded humans for their entire evolutionary history. If animals can learn to live with other species in peace, and sometimes even in friendship, is it not possible that observing this extraordinary ability may yet act as a catalyst for us? Is it not possible that harmony among nations need be not a mere fantasy, but something we can learn from observing the achievements of these so-called lesser species? All that is lacking are the will and the humility.

In my experience, psychoanalysis demanded loyalty that could not be questioned, the blind acceptance of unexamined "wisdom". It is characteristic of religious orders to seek obedience without scepticism, but it spells the death of intellectual enquiry. All variants of "because I say so," or because the Koran says so, or the Bible says so, or the Upanishads say so, or Freud says so, or Marx says so, are simply different means of stifling intellectual dissent. In the end they cannot satisfy the inquisitive mind or still the doubts that naturally arise when such a mind is confronted with authoritative statements about human behavior.

Somewhat to my surprise, I was accepted for membership in the society [the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society]. I was looking forward to giving my inaugural paper, "The Navel of Neurosis: Trauma, Memory and Denial," the one I had written with my wife, Terri, and which Schiffer [Masson's analyst] had claimed as his.

Eissler's rage knew no bounds. He did not like being harrassed by other analysts. "Just today Masud Khan called me from London and asked me to dismiss you from the Archives. The board members, all of them, or at least most of them, are asking for the same."

The professional and financial interest in continuing animal experimentation helps to explain at least some resistance to the notion that animals have a complex emotional life and are capable of experiencing the higher emotions, such as love, compassion, altruism, disappointment and nostalgia. To acknowledge such a possibility implies certain moral obligations. If chimpanzees can experience loneliness and mental anguish, it becomes more wrong to use them for experiments in which they are isolated and anticipate daily pain.

Animals cry. At least, they vocalise pain or distress, and perhaps call for help. Most people believe, therefore, that animals can be unhappy and also that they have such feelings as happiness, anger and fear. But there is a tremendous gap between the common sense viewpoint and that of official science on this subject. The ordinary layperson readily believes that his dog, her eat, their parrot or horse, feels. They not only believe it but have constant evidence of it before their eyes. All of us have extraordinary stories of animals we know well. Yet, by dint of rigorous training and great efforts of the mind, most modern scientists — especially those who study the behaviour of animals — have succeeded in becoming almost blind to these matters.

I was thrilled. I loved the idea of opening everything up, of making old and secret documents available to anybody who wished to see them.

There is rarely an exception: once a cat makes up her mind to do something, your pleadings matter not at all. A dog, in the same circumstances, no matter how urgently he needs to do something, will change his mind if you insist. He is made for compromise, for self-sacrifice, for thinking about how you feel. Not cats.

Perhaps if we had realized they are birds, with all the wonderful characteristics of birds, we would have paid closer attention to the ways in which chickens can enchant us. Take dust-bathing, for example. We call it a bath because the chicken finds a small indentation of dry earth and then proceeds to immerse herself in it as into a warm bath. The earth cleans her feathers. The first time I saw a chicken taking a dust bath, stretching out one iridescent wing and holding it up to the sunshine, then settling into the warmth of the afternoon only to fly effortlessly to a tree to roost in the evening, I was astonished.

Unlike a human smile, purring cannot be, as far as anyone knows, faked.

Every day I get many calls, from all over the world about how awful you are. How awful this article is. How bad it all is for psychoanalysis.

First, the eight rules of tolerance: 1. Stay out of the way. 2. Don't pick a fight. 3. If challenged, walk away. 4. Avoid eye contact. 5. If your enemy is diurnal, learn to be nocturnal. 6. Vice versa. 7. Possess nothing the other wants. 8. Draw the line at hurting kids: I will fight to the death.
After tolerance is achieved comes play. Here are the nine rules of play: 1. Know when to quit. 2. Learn how to handicap. 3. Learn what frightens the other (cat claws). 4. Don't let it get to you. It's just a game; you mustn't take it seriously (cats have trouble with this one—escalation is always a risk in cat games). 5. Don't eat your playmate. 6. Pay attention to the signals on the other side—for instance, “enough” and “quit.” 7. Don't suddenly change the rules. 8. Don't be a sore loser. 9. Remember: It's only a game.
And if play succeeds, we can move on to the eight rules of friendship: 1. Learn the rules of your opposite number. 2. Recognize that danger is no longer relevant. 3. Take your time. 4. One step at a time. 5. Apologize often by learning the other's words, gestures, sounds, or postures for “I'm sorry.” 6. Acknowledge mistakes. 7. Make the offer of friendship more than once. 8. Express curiosity about what the other is like.