Jeffrey Masson

Author and professor

Jeffrey Masson is a New Zealand-based writer who has been a professor at several universities in Canada and America. After serving as Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, he wrote a series of books critical of psychiatry and therapy.

In Against Therapy (1993) he attacked the very foundations of modern psychotherapy from Freud to Jung, from Fritz Perls to Carl Rodgers, contending that, since therapy's aim is to change people, and this is achieved according to the therapist's own notions and prejudices, the psychological process is necessarily corrupt.

In the 1990s he turned his attention to animals, in particular their emotional lives, and has written eight books on the subject.