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Montreal Gazette, February 12, 2005 “Seduction is a fast-paced modern novel filled with snappy dialogue, exotic settings and juicy intellectual plums, somewhat in the manner of The Da Vinci Code.” (full review below) Time Magazine, February 14, 2005 (pdf download) Globe and Mail, February 14, 2005 Sometimes a Dick is Just a Detective No one thinks about Freud much these days, except maybe academics and a dwindling number of old-school psychoanalysts. His insights on sex, aggression and the unconscious have been absorbed into mainstream culture and his "talking cure" has been replaced by happy pills for all. Yet it wasn't so long ago that everyone of a certain class had their Freudian analyst and dutifully stretched out on the couch to dig deep into the annals of their potty training. And as recently as the 1980s, the dismissal of the controversial projects director of the Freud Archives, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, was mainstream news. Good-looking and provocative, Masson rocked the psychoanalytic community with his allegations about Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory, and became the subject of long, probing New Yorker articles by Janet Malcolm — which themselves sparked a modest media frenzy when Masson sued for libel. After publishing a number of books, including The Assault on Truth — in which he argued that self-interest prompted Freud to revise his original theory that hysteria was caused by sexual abuse — Masson became so disgusted with psychoanalysis that he gave up on humans altogether and devoted himself to writing about animals. But the story of his assault on the psychoanalytic establishment is so juicy it's inspired a novel, the fiction debut of Toronto psychologist Catherine Gildiner, author of the bestselling memoir Too Close To the Falls. Without mentioning it as such, Seduction uses the Masson affair as the starting point for a detective story starring an unlikely but likable pair of "Freudian dicks" hired to investigate the new director of the Freud academy. They are Kate Fitzgerald, a PhD in the philosophy of science who read through Freud's complete works while doing time for killing her husband, and Jackie Lawton, a bank robber turned private eye. She's a former rich daddy's girl and he's a former career criminal. She's book smart; he's street smart. They both have issues with intimacy. Naturally, they love/hate each other. The director of the academy, Anders Konzak, is blond and has a PhD in Russian literature; Masson is dark and a Sanskrit scholar by training. But otherwise Gildiner's brash young upstart will seem strangely familiar to anyone who's read Malcolm's In the Freud Archives (based on her New Yorker articles). Like Malcolm's Masson, Konzak is a glib, self-confident womanizer who charms the aging director of the Freud academy into choosing him as his successor, but betrays his besotted mentor by publicly attacking Freud. But while Masson merely got psychoanalysts' knickers in a knot, Konzak receives some serious death threats. Freud himself doesn't have a speaking part, but Gildiner's cast of characters includes a journalist named Dvorah Little, who appears to be very loosely based on Malcolm, as well as Anna Freud — the original daddy's girl who in real life died unmarried, having devoted her life to protecting Freud's legacy. A strange cross between straight crime fiction and a literary mystery in the style of A.S. Byatt's Possession, Seduction can't quite decide what it wants to be. A nice way of putting this is to say it works on two levels — and it really does work, despite its identity problems. Book-review clichés come to mind: "I couldn't put it down," "compulsively readable," etc. It's a zippy little thriller full of exotic locales, colourful characters, excessive detail about décor and clothes, improbable plot twists, bodies piling up and red herrings — the usual trappings of the genre. For lovers of scholarly intrigue, there are also gossipy speculations about the Masson controversy and secrets in the Freud archives. The uninitiated need not worry: Gildiner, who wrote her PhD thesis on Darwin's influence on Freud, provides a crash course on Freud for Dummies at the beginning of the novel. Aside from some unnecessary psychologizing about the main characters and one too many puns (there's a joke about a psychoanalyst's yacht being tied up at a "Freudian slip"), Seduction is smart and entertaining — brainy fun for a cold winter's night. The novel is at its best when Gildiner puts her academic credentials to work. While Jackie checks out suspects who might want to shut Konzak up, Kate hunts down clues in Freud's papers, wondering what Konzak might have found in his research. Why did Freud change his focus from real abuse to incestuous fantasies as the cause of hysteria? Was there something in his personal life that caused his about-face? As the murderer closes in, Kate uncovers private pain buried under the elegance of psychoanalytic theory. On the level of pure entertainment, there are equally pressing questions: Will Kate and Jackie get it on, even though she's an icy WASP princess and he's a reformed hoodlum who picks his teeth? Why did Kate kill her husband and what's up with her daddy fixation? With her understanding of Freud, Gildiner could have written a weightier novel about the genius who defied society in order to develop, as she writes, "a theory that offered a profound, if not perfect, explanation for the motivations of mankind." But there's something irresistible about the idea of Freudian dicks poking around in the private parts of a very public life. Freud himself might have found it seductive.
Montreal Gazette, February 12, 2005 In 1895, Sigmund Freud devised his "seduction theory" - so many of his female patients described being sexually abused by their fathers that Freud believed hysteria was caused by incest in early childhood. The public outcry, especially from outraged fathers (who were paying Freud's hefty bills), was as loud as it had been when Darwin published The Origin of Species, 30 or so years earlier. Two years later, unlike Darwin, Freud abandoned his theory, believing that young women only fantasized being abused, because they secretly wanted to have sexual relations with their fathers. He called this the Oedipal Complex - men weren't to blame after all, it was women who brought on their own hysteria. The outcry disappeared. One of the questions Catherine Gildiner, a practising psychologist in Toronto who wrote her PhD thesis on Darwin's influence on Freud, raises in Seduction is: Why did Freud suddenly do an about-face? Seduction is a detective novel, actually a double mystery. The contemporary plot is fairly straightforward: in 1982, a prominent American psychiatrist named Anders Konzak is murdered because he is poised to reveal information about Freud that will destroy Freud's reputation and cast the entire basis of modern psychoanalysis in disrepute. Modern psychoanalysis is a multibillion-dollar business. Exit Konzak. But the real mystery is: What was Konzak going to reveal that would "make psychoanalysis obsolete"? That is what Kate Fitzgerald - a Freudian expert who has spent a decade in prison for murdering her husband - is charged with finding out. She is teamed up with another ex-con, Jackie Lawton, and together they hopscotch from Vienna to London to New York to Toronto tracking down clues to both mysteries. The real-life basis for the contemporary plot is the 1980s conflict between the psychoanalytic establishment and the then young scholar Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (the prototype of Anders Konzak), who was a flamboyant, brilliant, handsome Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst turned virulent anti-Freudian. Another of Gildiner's characters, the enigmatic Wizard, is based on Peter Swales, a former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar. Anyone who doubts that an intellectual debate over Freud's integrity could lead to murder should read Janet Malcolm's chilling 1983 account of that controversy, In the Freud Archives. What Gildiner does brilliantly is speculate on what it was about Freud that could turn a scholar who delves deeply enough into Freud's psyche and biography into an enemy of the master. Several intriguing possibilities arise: Freud was so avid for fame that he deliberately nixed his controversial theory, abandoning all those damaged women; Freud faked his research, analyzing only himself and writing up case histories of imaginary patients; Freud had a life-long affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who became pregnant and might have been the real, infamous "Anna O." Gildiner's riff on the possible truth behind the Anna O. case alone is worth the price of admission. As are the delicious parallels between the lives and thoughts of Darwin and Freud: both, for example, posited sex as the driving mechanism behind both evolution and civilization. Darwin held that evolution was made possible by an individual's need to pass his or her genes on to the next generation, and Freud studied what happened to people when that need was suppressed or sublimated into other drives. Freud started out in the 1870s as a biologist, and late in life Darwin became chiefly interested in human emotions and their expression. Seduction is thus a novel of ideas as much as a work of detection. Like many detecting couples, Kate and Jackie have their own problems, both psychological and interpersonal, that need to be worked out before their partnership can become fruitful. One of the most affecting passages in the book is that in which Kate receives psychotherapy from Anna Freud, Freud's daughter and, of course, a prime suspect in the murder of Anders Konzak. Seduction is a fast-paced modern novel filled with snappy dialogue, exotic settings and juicy intellectual plums, somewhat in the manner of The Da Vinci Code. It, too, is a long novel, but then shouldn't seduction be a long, exciting process? — Wayne Grady, The Montreal Gazette, February 12, 2005 |
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