Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

"Ferenczi was considered paranoid for believing his women patients; the mens confessions were not even discussed. Ernest Jones, the powerful English analyst who had been Ferenczis analysand, now took up the cudgel against him in deadly seriousness. Jones let it be known after Ferenczis death in 1933 (he died a few months after the quarrel with Freud) that he was really a homicidal maniac. While I was in London working in the Jones archives I discovered what this really meant: Jones believed that to disagree with Freud (the father) was tantamount to patricide (father murder). And so, because Ferenczi believed that children were sexually abused and Freud did not, Ferenczi was branded by Jones as a homicidal maniac, and this piece of scurrilous interpretation stuck."

"Because I was so eager to believe I was being helped by a talented, ethical, benevolent, and intelligent man, I sought evidence for this wherever I could. Anything less than this was too dreadful to contemplate."

"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 [Massons analyst] had claimed as his."

"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."

"Almost all analysts in America are physicians and psychiatrists, and the medical profession is layered into a strict hierarchy. Every psychiatrist in a hospital is chief of some service, or head of some department."

"To me, looking at other people in terms of what is wrong with them —these gradations of disturbance— was and is distasteful. Always implicit in the doctors view is, of course, how much more "healthy" you are than they. And this is almost never the case."