Stranger in the paradise of Karaka Bay

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Go to the end of Peacock Place, circumnavigate the sleeping dog and follow the steep walkway down past the grand old pohutukawa and the kawakawa and you'll arrive at Karaka Bay.

There are dinghies upended on the little beach, a vegetable garden with broad beans and giant cardoons, more dogs. An eclectic huddle of buildings ranging from the deceptively bach-like but really quite grand to the rusting corrugated iron shed. There are no cars. You're 15 minutes from the central business district.

Now, imagine that you're an American with a reputation for controversy and that you have stumbled upon this charmingly idiosyncratic place for the first time. You might just think that you'd wandered into Paradise.

Jeffrey Masson certainly did. That he came to Paradise in search of a pig and ended up buying a sliver of land for a wedge of cash is a peculiarly Masson sort of story.

Because things happen to Masson. In his present incarnation, Jeffrey Masson is the author of best-selling books with unlikely titles - Dogs Never Lie About Love; When Elephants Weep.

A year ago, the man who delves into the emotional lives of animals was on holiday in New Zealand when he heard about Piglet, the 200kg pig, pet of long-time Karaka Bay resident, Tony Watkins. Piglet lived on the beach here for two years and divided the tiny community. In 1998 the anti-pig faction won a legal battle and Piglet was moved on.

Masson visited Watkins anyway, fell head over heels in love with the bay, distributed business cards, let people know that if they wanted to sell, he wanted to buy.

In February he got a call: for $700,000, which buys you (at Karaka Bay prices) a 816sq m parcel of land and a crumbling bach, he could buy into Paradise.

On a balmy Monday morning I meet Masson here. The bach had gone the way of the pig. The $700,000, Nicholas Stevens-designed house Masson will share with his paediatrician wife, Leila, and their four year-old son, Ilan, is slowly taking shape. Slowly, because this is a section on a 45-degree angle with no access except by barge or that walkway.

Masson, who will turn 60 on March 28, is as excited on moving-in day as the black labrador, Wagger, who has just swiped a worker's lunchtime baguette. If Masson had a tail, he'd be wagging it.

What we're looking at is steel framing and a newly poured concrete floor (Wagger walked across it earlier in the morning) but Masson is ticking off its features: a library for his 15,000 books, yoga room, weight room, a grass roof, underfloor central heating, solar panels, terraced gardens. And a view from the verandah across to Browns Island and to Rangitoto beyond.

You don't undertake a project like this without upsetting a few of the neighbours. The day before a helicopter delivering five tonnes of scoria tore limbs off fruit trees next door. "The neighbours," Masson grimaces, "were not very happy about that." He phoned, he apologised profusely, he thinks he's been forgiven.

If this is as much trouble as Masson gets in Paradise, a few people will be surprised. So might Masson himself. Because the genial, fast-talking man in the crumpled shirt and jeans is known, in the cloistered world of American psychoanalysis, as the Black Beast of psychoanalysis. There is nobody as reviled as a member of an inner sanctum who betrays secrets - and that is just what the profession considers Masson did.

How the erstwhile professor of Sanskrit (you might say that Masson specialises in the obscure) came to gain entry to the place the secrets were stored is typically, contrarily, Masson.

He trained as a Freudian analyst but practised only briefly. He graduated and immediately realised, he says, "This is not the profession for me in terms of sitting down and listening to people. Oh yeah, I was terrible at it: not patient, not good at listening. I was in the middle of a divorce and women would come in and say, 'My marriage is in tatters,' and I wanted to say, 'Mine too. You know, you should hear about mine."'

Instead, the analyst who couldn't listen got one of the top jobs in Freudian circles. He became project director of the Freud archives, working with Anna Freud (Freud's daughter) and was in line for the top job: director of the archives. But Masson, depending on your point of view, either blew it - or made his name. He discovered letters which, he said, showed that Freud had deliberately suppressed evidence of incest to support his theory of female infantile fantasy.

Masson published, was promptly sacked, sued the archive and went on to take the ultimate revenge against the profession. He published a scathing attack on psychoanalysis, Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing and Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst.

It was an expose which was unlikely to endear him to his former peers. As a highly entertaining spat, it led to a 48,000-word article in the New Yorker by journalist Janet Malcolm which, in turn, portrayed Masson in less than flattering terms. As a "megalomaniac, womanising liar - well maybe not a liar," Masson says with a laugh that sounds slightly strained. Which is understandable given that the subsequent court battle - Masson sued the New Yorker for $10 million - dragged on for 10 years. Masson finally lost the case in 1994.

But he did win acknowledgment that five of the direct quotes Malcolm had attributed to him could not be sourced. Now, sitting relaxed in the sun on a neighbour's deck, Masson says he regrets fighting through the courts. "It allowed psychoanalysts to say 'The guy's a nut. We don't have to take his ideas seriously.' To say that there was no historical issue to be grappled with, he's not on to anything. And the truth was, I was on to something that had nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with my personality and everything to do with how society had been treating women ... "

The Freudian episode was not the first time Masson had rebelled against an authority figure. He was raised, bizarrely, in a household which consisted of his gem-dealer father, his mother, sister - and his father's guru. The guru, an elusive figure who started life as Raphael Hurst and became Paul Brunton (he had a nose job to disguise, Masson believes, the fact that he was half Jewish), imparted his own peculiar brand of Indian mysticism. He fed Masson stories about how he'd come from Venus and hence couldn't drive a car - "Jeffrey, on Venus there are no cars" - and named the young boy as his spiritual successor. That successor grew up to challenge the master and to publish a book called My Father's Guru: A Journey through Spirituality and Disillusion.

Masson was the heir to the archives, that Freudian kingdom; heir to the spiritual kingdom promised by the guru (who - it just gets odder - spent some time in New Zealand in the late 50s, although Masson has no idea what he did here.) Freudians might have quite a lot to say about that.

They certainly would, says Masson. They'd say, "Aah. That's why Jeff Masson has wound up in New Zealand: he's following his spiritual guru." They'd say that Masson was engaged in an Oedipal struggle; that, as Masson puts it, he "killed his father Freud, he killed his guru, and now he kills the scientific world. And all the problems are within him. He really is the Black Beast."

Science is the new guru - and it's fair to say that within the scientific community what Masson has to say is regarded as a form of scientific heresy. Masson is relaxed about the critics. He can afford to be: the Elephant title (co-written with Susan McCarthy) sold almost half a million copies in the United States. In any case, "I'd say that there's some truth in the scientific criticism about me. 'Who is this interloper? Who is this person who comes without any scientific training into my field?' To some extent you could say they're right. To really do this right I should have had the training that these scientists have - plus some of the daring that I've brought to it. Some of the willingness to ask questions that they haven't asked."

Masson more than asks, he makes deliberately outrageous statements. It's tempting to surmise that, when he says things like "it occurred to me that I really had a higher regard for dogs than I did for other humans [in terms of learning anything from them]," he's still firing shots at his one-time profession. He knows it's outrageous. "Yeah, but it's true. I bet you in 100 years people will say, 'Of course we know that there are animals which dive deeper, that run faster. Why shouldn't there be animals that feel more deeply certain kinds of emotions?' I think we're better at certain other emotions. Dogs are better at friendship, for example."

His new book, released here this month, is The Emperor's Embrace: Fatherhood in Revolution, which he started writing when he faced second-time-round fatherhood (he has a 26-year-old daughter from his first marriage.) "I decided that since I had turned to animals to learn about human emotions, could I learn about fathers from animal fathers." The emperor of the title is the emperor penguin, whose fatherhood role involves balancing the penguin egg on its feet for four months through the blizzards and cold of 20-hour Antarctic nights. Fathering, for human fathers, ought to be a cinch by comparison. Masson found (surprise, surprise) that his field of research was "very unpopular with other men. They get very annoyed ... that good fathering seems to be connected to monogamy or at least to being very involved with a single partner. I can't think of a single animal that has a harem where the animal makes a good father."

It's sometimes hard to tell when this modern-day Dr Dolittle is just being mischievous. He enjoys, it is obvious, being the guy who does the muckraking. "Muckraking, of course, has a terrible sound, but if there's a lot of muck around you do want to rake it in order to find something valuable underneath."

Masson is giving fair warning this time. He plans to write a book called Why I Choose to Live in New Zealand. "This is the first time I'm ever going to look at a country in terms of what's right here. I'm very good at discovering what's wrong. It's an odd feeling for me to be living in New Zealand and to think, 'My God, this place is really different from any other.'

"People who are very sceptical say, 'Wait, you're going to discover really what's wrong here, but it may take you a year or two."'

You can tell by the way he sniffs the sea air, the way his eyes light up as he contemplates what will be the view from his beach house and enthuses about learning to kayak, that what Masson would really like to discover, this time around, is that there are no snakes in Paradise.