SOURCE: Himmelfarb, Gertrude. “The Right to Misquote.” Commentary 91, no. 4 (April 1991): 31-4.

In the following essay, Himmelfarb examines the Masson v. Malcolm lawsuit and its legal ramifications, referring to In the Freud Archives and written summaries about the case. Himmelfarb asserts that Malcolm's misuse of direct quotes is dishonest and unprofessional.

It is not often that the Supreme Court is presented with a case in which the evidence consists of such titillating remarks, allegedly made by the plaintiff, as his likening himself to “an intellectual gigolo,” desiring to convert Anna Freud's house, the repository of the Freud Archives, into “a place of sex, women, fun,” and anticipating being acclaimed “the greatest analyst who ever lived”—after Freud, to be sure.

These are among the quotations attributed to Jeffrey Masson by Janet Malcolm in two articles in the New Yorker in December 1983 and in her book In the Freud Archives...