This is a fascinating tale of the conflict around Sigmund Freud’s archives collected initially by a prominent New York via Vienna psychoanalyst named K.R. Eissler ,Anna Freud, and Muriel Gardiner, a wealthy analyst who bought the Freud home in Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, and then donated to the Library of Congress.  Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a Harvard graduate born in 1948, was a Sanskrit professor and psychoanalyst from Toronto when Eissler ‘adopted’ him in the late 1970’s and made him the Secretary of the Archives in 1980.  Masson then gave a lecture at Yale in which he accused Freud of being a fraud after he abandoned the ‘seduction theory’  and moved from the ‘actual’ to the ‘fantasized’ as the source of neurotic behaviors.  After a series of NYT articles and an uproar from the analytic community, Masson was relieved of his post. He sued Eissler for millions of dollars and settled out of court.   Malcolm’s interview with Masson in 1982 in California wine country produced a New Yorker series and this book, after which Masson sued her and TNY without success.  Masson has gone on to become a well known author of books about animals and their emotional lives.  He lives in New Zealand with his second wife and two young sons.  One comes away from the book convinced that Masson has a serious personality disorder whether he’s right or wrong about Freud and his contributions.  Malcolm writing in her usual ‘stenographic’ style with great phrases as in “The crowning paradox of psycho-analysis is the near-uselessness of its insights.  To ‘make the unconscious conscious”—the program of psychoanalytic therapy—is to pour water into a sieve.  The moisture that remains on the surface of the mesh is the benefit of the analysis.”  tells a great tale with vivid personalities and much drama.  As in the story of the murders, The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm is brutally honest both about the characters and about the journalistic techniques that she uses to win their confidence.  McDonald and McGinnis sued her after that book as well.   Eager to know more about the current status of Freud and psychoanalysis.   Whew!