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Masson readily admits that others have had this idea before him. In the early 1930s Sandor Ferenczi, a disciple of Freud's and an influential psychoanalyst, confessed his growing doubts about his profession to his diary, which has not yet been published in English. Masson quotes generously from this document, showing a poignant portrait of a man torn between increasingly rigid doctrine and what he saw with his senses: "We greet the patient in a friendly manner, make sure the transference will take, and while the patient lies there in misery, we sit comfortably in our armchair, quietly smoking a cigar." Ferenczi realized that worse things than indifference could grow out of this situation: "Analysis is an easy opportunity to carry out unconscious, purely selfish, unscrupulous, immoral, even criminal acts and a chance to act out such behavior guiltlessly."
Sure enough, Masson provides plenty of examples of abusive behavior on the part of psychotherapists, especially those who have access to patients in mental institutions. There is the case of John Rosen, whose "direct analysis" still receives attention in some textbooks even though he surrendered his medical license in 1983 rather than face charges by the Pennsylvania medical board. Rosen's specialty was the rough treatment of schizophrenics to gain their attention. And then there was D. Ewen Cameron (1901-67), a much lauded and honored psychiatrist who, at the behest of the CIA, used repeated electroshock treatments on a large number of hospital patients. Cameron's intent was to do research on brainwashing techniques; unfortunately, he never told his patients. Masson claims that the psychiatric profession was remarkably sanguine about this behavior when news of it finally surfaced, and he remains outraged: "Some psychiatrists might claim that what Cameron did is only an abuse of psychiatry. It is virtually impossible to find a practicing psychiatrist who can see that what Cameron did is the very purpose of psychiatry, that this is its use, not its abuse."
That is a slippery conclusion, in which Masson blames psychiatrists because they do not agree with him. Although the author's slash-and-burn style of argument can be entertaining, readers should keep their hands on their wallets. Assertions tend to be sold as established facts. Masson writes, for example, that before psychotherapy begins, a "moral judgment" must be made that potential patients "are not living well, or as well as other people, and are therefore in need of 'help.' We often claim that the people seeking psychotherapy make this moral judgment on their own, but this is almost never true." Almost never true, that mentally or emotionally distressed people seek help voluntarily? For his thesis to be persuasive, Masson needs to establish the notion of a vast, coercive system for bringing people into line and, if that fails, storing them away in cruel institutions. But his proof, to put it mildly, is highly subjective.