Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth: Denial and Acknowledgment of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Published in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 2025, Volume 61. Jeffrey Masson’s The assault on truth: Denial and acknowledgment of childhood sexual abuse: A review of contemporary perspectives on Freud’s seduction theory and psychotherapy. Edited by Warwick Middleton and Martin J. Dorahy. New York: Routledge, 2024, 248 pp.

To say Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth caused a sensation when it was first published in 1984 would be an understatement. Many viewed it at the time as an act of heresy, later contributing to Masson’s banishment from the very psychoanalytic community that only a few years earlier embraced him as a rising star. The impact of his thesis, in which he accused Freud of lacking “courage” (Masson, 1984, p. 189) following the retraction of his “seduction theory” for the more palatable Oedipal Complex, was seismatic, the reverberations of which can be felt on each page of Contemporary Perspectives on Freud’s Seduction Theory and Psychotherapy, edited by Warwick Middleton and Martin J. Dorahy. This collection of essays, written by some of the leading experts in the field of trauma studies (including a few psychoanalysts), seeks to shed light on the controversy surrounding Masson’s scholarship, while also exploring the complicated dynamics around childhood sexual abuse (CSA).

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