In 1981 Jeffrey Masson, then a practising psychoanalyst and director of the Freud Archives, used his access to Freud's long-unpublished letters to challenge the very foundations of Freudian theory. This book asserts that Freud, personally reluctant to face the reality of sexual abuse of children and fearing negative public reaction to such a shocking theory, abandoned a valid scientific finding. Freud's revised theory - that his patients' "memories" of seduction and rape were in fact fantasies - became and remains the basis for the whole science of psychoanalysis; it is a theory, Masson argues, that needs careful re-examination.