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Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
Through an intensive study of 'Aaron Green,' a Freudian analyst in New York City, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm reveals the inner workings of psychoanalysis.
184 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1981
141 people are currently reading
4442 people want to read
About the author
Janet Malcolm
24 books508 followersJanet Malcolm was a journalist, biographer, collagist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of
In the Freud Archives
and
The Crime of Sheila McGough
, as well as biographies of Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, and Anton Chekhov.
The Modern Library chose her controversial book The Journalist and the Murderer — with its infamous first line — as one of the 100 best non-fiction works of the 20th century.
Her most recent book is Forty-one False Starts .
The Modern Library chose her controversial book The Journalist and the Murderer — with its infamous first line — as one of the 100 best non-fiction works of the 20th century.
Her most recent book is Forty-one False Starts .
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 153 reviews
April 12, 2015
When I read reviews of this book years ago, I came away with the idea that Malcolm debunked the effectiveness of psychoanalysis. That is far from the case. Yes, the book, and the interviews with 'Aaron Green,' make very clear that psychoanalysis is not about helping or curing people or making them happier, but about bringing about a relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. No one is necessarily going to be happier about this and may, at first, feel miserable. On the other hand it does make sense that one's unconscious dramas would exert less power over one's life; that we would go through less unconscious acting out of fundamental conflicts if only we experienced them more consciously; that that experience in itself changes us just as exposure to light causes certain chemical reactions and fundamental changes in plant development. What Malcolm makes clearer are these Freudian ideas and theories and how Freudian analysts believe that by putting them into practice, analysts enable this process in their analysands. And she does so as few could, with perceptiveness and brilliance. She does one thing journalists are supposed to do -- accurately inform us, without bias.
August 17, 2019
It really is a different perspective. Most of the forays into Freud, Freudianism, and pyschoanalysis (or at least the dozens that I have encountered) focus primarily on drilling into the psychology, fleshing out the various theories of the psycho-social stages, applying Freudian insights to the broader society and culture, or a combination of the three. This was uniquely, among other focuses, on the dynamics of analysis.
As Malcolm accurately depicts, psychoanalysis and the surrounding literature were engaged in sectarian, internecine struggles that most patients knew little about. Patients making an appointment inquired little if their analyst was a practicing Ferenczian, Kleinien, or orthodox Freudian. However, these matters make considerable practical significance in the course of analysis and guide how an analyst will interpret and respond (or don't respond) to transferences and countertransferences.
It's interesting. Freud, Fredianism, and psychoanalysis were considered passe for most of my lifetime. It was thought they hit their heyday from the early 1900s to when this book was published in 1977, and then were supposedly eclipsed. (Parenthetically, the same was said of Marx, Marxism, and the critical analysis of capitalism.) As pointed out by Malcolm and her pseudonymous interlocutor "Aaron Green" every generation must rediscover Freud's insights for themselves. The understanding of the drives is one of Freud's key insights. We can try to deny--or culture can try to convince us to deny--our basic biology, our human biologic basis, but it only comes back to hit us again with the "return of the repressed." From my perspective, this is one of the real fundamental things that Freud's insights about the drives unconcealed.
What's equally interesting, is that for these and other reasons, Freud, Freudianism, and psychoanalysis are mounting a comeback. While they were in the wilderness since the mid 80's, there were of course little outposts holding down the fort. The truth of the matter is, probably, that they were heretofore really the avant-garde (even during their heyday) but never mainstream; imagine a 1920s or 1970s working class guy in Kansas or Oklahoma espousing Freudian insights - hardly. But now strikingly, they are becoming de rigueur on campuses again. This is a positive development. As Freudianism and psychanalysis are coming out of the wilderness, I am hoping that the new generation of practitioners and theorists were able to put to bed the old doctrinal issues. The pessimist in me knows this will not be the case.
As Malcolm accurately depicts, psychoanalysis and the surrounding literature were engaged in sectarian, internecine struggles that most patients knew little about. Patients making an appointment inquired little if their analyst was a practicing Ferenczian, Kleinien, or orthodox Freudian. However, these matters make considerable practical significance in the course of analysis and guide how an analyst will interpret and respond (or don't respond) to transferences and countertransferences.
It's interesting. Freud, Fredianism, and psychoanalysis were considered passe for most of my lifetime. It was thought they hit their heyday from the early 1900s to when this book was published in 1977, and then were supposedly eclipsed. (Parenthetically, the same was said of Marx, Marxism, and the critical analysis of capitalism.) As pointed out by Malcolm and her pseudonymous interlocutor "Aaron Green" every generation must rediscover Freud's insights for themselves. The understanding of the drives is one of Freud's key insights. We can try to deny--or culture can try to convince us to deny--our basic biology, our human biologic basis, but it only comes back to hit us again with the "return of the repressed." From my perspective, this is one of the real fundamental things that Freud's insights about the drives unconcealed.
What's equally interesting, is that for these and other reasons, Freud, Freudianism, and psychoanalysis are mounting a comeback. While they were in the wilderness since the mid 80's, there were of course little outposts holding down the fort. The truth of the matter is, probably, that they were heretofore really the avant-garde (even during their heyday) but never mainstream; imagine a 1920s or 1970s working class guy in Kansas or Oklahoma espousing Freudian insights - hardly. But now strikingly, they are becoming de rigueur on campuses again. This is a positive development. As Freudianism and psychanalysis are coming out of the wilderness, I am hoping that the new generation of practitioners and theorists were able to put to bed the old doctrinal issues. The pessimist in me knows this will not be the case.
June 25, 2019
two-day beach read. fun/educational ratio of a new yorker essay. a lot of overview of psychoanalytic theory, from freud through kohut, but presented in such a way that it all reads like gossip! a century of delicious gossip! i mean this as the highest compliment.
December 31, 2013
“At the end of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ the human characters wake up and rub their eyes and aren’t sure what has happened to them. They have the feeling that a great deal has occurred—that things have somehow changed for the better, but they don’t know what caused the change. Analysis is like that for many patients.”
July 20, 2013
This is how much I love Janet Malcolm: I finished rereading this, my least favourite of her books, but the cats had just settled on my lap so I turned back to the first page and immediately, happily started reading it again. Kind of like the time me and Keg watched Honey twice in a row. Don't have anything insightful to say about this book, obviously.
August 16, 2023
I read "Psychoanalysis" by the Czech-American journalist Janet Malcolm on the train back from Germany to the Netherlands. For her book (published as two articles in The New Yorker in 1980), Malcolm dove into the world of psychoanalysis by conducting several interviews with New York-based psychoanalyst "Aaron Green".
Although a Dutch psychology student who I bumped into on the train told me psychoanalysis is just nonsense after asking me what I was reading, Malcolm's "Psychonalaysis" is not interested in that debate. She instead focuses on the relationships that develop between psychoanalysts and their patients: is it actually possible for analysts to have and maintain a strictly professional relationship with their patients when the latter visit five days a week for sometimes periods up to nine years? Malcolm is interested in both the relationships that develop between analysts and patients as well as analysts among themselves (spoiler: most analysts just hang out with other analysts, marry other analysts and basically devote their entire life to psychoanalysis).
Malcolm tries to find answers by first diving into Freud's work. Since all of his female patients fell in love with him, Freud came up with a name for this phenomenon: transference. The women didn't actually love him, just the idea of him, he argued. Freud therefore developed the opinion that analysts should put aside all their human feelings and sympathy in therapy: this would be most beneficial for the patient's treatment. However, Freud's recommendation still divides the field of psychoanalysis. For example, when a patient tells of their mother's passing, should an analyst remain stoic as Freud would have wanted or show empathy? What's the most professional yet human way an analyst can conduct themselves? By interviewing Green, Malcolm gives her reader an insider's take on the matter.
Although a Dutch psychology student who I bumped into on the train told me psychoanalysis is just nonsense after asking me what I was reading, Malcolm's "Psychonalaysis" is not interested in that debate. She instead focuses on the relationships that develop between psychoanalysts and their patients: is it actually possible for analysts to have and maintain a strictly professional relationship with their patients when the latter visit five days a week for sometimes periods up to nine years? Malcolm is interested in both the relationships that develop between analysts and patients as well as analysts among themselves (spoiler: most analysts just hang out with other analysts, marry other analysts and basically devote their entire life to psychoanalysis).
Malcolm tries to find answers by first diving into Freud's work. Since all of his female patients fell in love with him, Freud came up with a name for this phenomenon: transference. The women didn't actually love him, just the idea of him, he argued. Freud therefore developed the opinion that analysts should put aside all their human feelings and sympathy in therapy: this would be most beneficial for the patient's treatment. However, Freud's recommendation still divides the field of psychoanalysis. For example, when a patient tells of their mother's passing, should an analyst remain stoic as Freud would have wanted or show empathy? What's the most professional yet human way an analyst can conduct themselves? By interviewing Green, Malcolm gives her reader an insider's take on the matter.
April 14, 2024
After much time reading, pausing, and reading again, I’ve found this book to be a tremendous piece of journalism providing insight into the nuances (good, bad, and in between!) of psychoanalysis. What a deeply researched and thoughtfully constructed book that both mimics the natural progression of analysis through the content structure of its chapters, while distilling difficult analytic concepts into simple ideas. Wonderful and beautiful!
January 18, 2021
love u janet!
July 9, 2021
just fantastic... on one level, this is a great primer on psychoanalysis, covering all its main themes and debates in a concise manner. on another level, it's a great primer on the art of the interview. not only has malcolm chosen a funny, intriguing, articulate candidate for her main interview subject (a new york psychoanalyst under the pseudonym "aaron green"), but she also shows her skills as a subtle and attentive interviewer. her questions give a sense of momentum to the book and elicit extremely quotable insights from her subject. in a little over 150 pages, she deftly captures the stormy, paradoxical dramas of psychoanalysis, why freud's breakthroughs number among the most revolutionary feats of human thought (comparable to the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin, as the book quotes Green saying), and why the influence of psychoanalysis remains so potent today (especially among artists, who intuitively recognise things that academics and other administrative types do not) despite all the attempts to wash it out of syllabuses.
August 13, 2023
This was a quick and engaging introduction (for me, at least) to the history and development of psychoanalysis. Through literature review, original interviews with Aaron and more, Malcolm takes you through a lot of the many debates about what psychoanalysis is and how it should be done. I learned a lot. Author was also self-aware, appropriately critical of psychoanalysis, and had a sense of humor. So glad I randomly picked up this book!
April 3, 2016
Mostly about transference, the erotic feelings that the patient may have for the psychoanalyst, and other weird features of the psychoanalyst/patient relationship. Grounded in Freud.
July 20, 2023
read in an airport bar with a 3-olive martini — recommended you do the same
May 18, 2023
Readable, smart, straightforward history of psychoanalysis / a profile of a Freudian analyst in NYC in the early eighties.
I would love an update for the present day (e.g. what are the different factions, are they still at intense theoretical war, are there analysts still offering full on orthodox classical analysis, how do analysts see themselves in relation to the current psychology mainstream, why is there a “resurgence” happening, etc etc).
I found a bit at the end, when the analyst Malcolm is interviewing laments how each generation has to “rediscover” Freud for themselves, to be reassuring:
Reassuring because I am the layman who doesn’t really know it! But I want to know it and feel open to knowing it.
Separately, I love how humble the aspirations of analysis are … the point isn’t to be cured or improved. It’s just to be slightly more conscious. I guess technically that is a huge accomplishment (i.e. perhaps not so humble). So maybe what I like is analysis’ honest marketing…Billboard that says: “You basically can’t change yourself but can you can become slightly more aware and develop a kind of useful ironic distance from your repetitive ways of being!”
From the profiled analyst:
And finally, a “lol but true” quote for my little archives:
I would love an update for the present day (e.g. what are the different factions, are they still at intense theoretical war, are there analysts still offering full on orthodox classical analysis, how do analysts see themselves in relation to the current psychology mainstream, why is there a “resurgence” happening, etc etc).
I found a bit at the end, when the analyst Malcolm is interviewing laments how each generation has to “rediscover” Freud for themselves, to be reassuring:
The insights of psychoanalysis are never taken for granted from one generation to the next. Each generation has to make the original discoveries afresh! You can’t just say that Freud discovered something and now it will be taught and transmitted as accepted knowledge, the way the findings of physics and biology and chemistry are transmitted. That doesn’t happen in psychoanalysis…And we have found out in psychoanalysis that in human development, too, there is a time that is uniquely formative—and the layman doesn’t know this. He can be told it a million times, he can read about it in so many books, he can even ‘believe’ it and he still doesn’t know it.
Reassuring because I am the layman who doesn’t really know it! But I want to know it and feel open to knowing it.
Separately, I love how humble the aspirations of analysis are … the point isn’t to be cured or improved. It’s just to be slightly more conscious. I guess technically that is a huge accomplishment (i.e. perhaps not so humble). So maybe what I like is analysis’ honest marketing…Billboard that says: “You basically can’t change yourself but can you can become slightly more aware and develop a kind of useful ironic distance from your repetitive ways of being!”
From the profiled analyst:
“Analysis isn’t intellectual. It isn’t moral. It isn’t educational. It’s an operation. It rearranges things inside the mind the way surgery rearranges things inside the body—even the way an automobile mechanic rearranges things under the hood of the car. It’s that impersonal and that radical. And the changes achieved are very small. We live our lives according to the repetition compulsion, and analysis can only go so far in freeing us from it. Analysis leaves the patient with more freedom of choice than he had before—but how much more? This much: Instead of going straight down the meridian, he will go five degrees, ten degrees—maybe fifteen degrees if you push very hard—to the left or right, but no more than that. I myself have changed less than some patients I’ve analyzed. Sometimes I get discouraged about myself. Sometimes I worry about myself.”
And finally, a “lol but true” quote for my little archives:
“I remember a seminar I once attended that was led by a brilliant and flamboyant Hungarian analyst named Robert Bak. The issue under debate was the nature of transference, and I raised my hand and asked rhetorically, ‘What would you call an interpersonal relationship where infantile wishes, and defenses against those wishes, get expressed in such a way that the persons within that relationship don’t see each other for what they objectively are but, rather, view each other in terms of their infantile needs and their infantile conflicts. What would you call that?’ And Bak looked over at me ironically and said ‘I’d call that life.’”
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December 29, 2015some quotes to remember from this book, which i liked a lot:
[aaron speaking] "[...] The older man saw the succession as the younger generation coming to cut off his member, and the younger man, who wanted the position, saw it in terms of cutting off the older man's member--thus his indecision. So they were very much in sync with each other in this Oedipal drama. Which exists only on a fantasy level. Because the fact is, it's a job. It's just a job! So is being a training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic. That's the funny thing about it all. Why can't adults deal with these things in terms of objective realities?"
"But if the job were seen for what it is--for the poor thing it is--who would want to do it?"
"That's just it. What are the sources of motivation and pleasure? The sources of motivation and pleasure are infantile wishes."
"Psychoanalysis, alone among today's psychotherapies, remains strictly a talking cure. Even the most far-out theorist will confine himself to telling his patients what he believes to be true about them, rather than attempting to manipulate or act on them."
I think I would like to be analyzed, more than just about any other type of therapy, for the reasons in the quotes above. The problem, though, is that fundamentally I think I'm a non-believer in the universality of the Oedipus-complex as a trauma that befalls all 3-5 year-old people and causes all of their neuroses for the rest of their lives. Whereas the avant-garde theorist of this book, the "object-relations person," believes that the "house" (as in, "man is not even master of his own house") is built earlier, in infancy, I feel like I can trace most of my personality problems to traumatic events in puberty, and would enjoy a form of therapy that focused around analyzing those memories. Maybe this is a complete misunderstanding of analysis. Because it's supposed to involve recovery of pre-memory memories. Maybe I just want to believe that being interpreted and metaphorized can be helpful as well as pleasurable, but am not actually receptive to being interpreted according to this orthodoxy. Freud on gender is too much of an essentialist failure for his Oedipal idea to really function all the way down, for me.
Maybe for Janet too. She does a good job being "journalistic" -- not seeming to pass judgment in her phrasing, even when she is. From the book: "Invariably, the cause of the trouble, the start of the debility, is traced back to childhood--to a particular, fateful, universal experience called the Oedipal complex. The complex describes the shattering, by fear of castration, of a small boy's dream of making love to his mother, and the formation of the superego as a permanent memorial to his dread. 'The paradoxical proposition that the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows' (as Freud wrote in The Ego and the Id) arises from this dire early experience. Freud's association of morality with castration anxiety--"the little lover" of four or five gives up his ambitions toward his mother fast, and forever, when 'more or less plainly, more or less brutally, a threat is pronounced that this part of him which he values so highly will be taken away from him'--led him to the inescapable conclusion that women, to whom the worst had already happened, must be less moral than men."
Two (or three -- 1a and 2a are the same thing phrased in opposite directions) things wrong: 1. Women are morally inferior to men for a biologically-based reason. (1a. Women are biologically-based anything.) 2. Female people are castrated male people. (2a. Female people = women.) Yet Janet is also the first person to make me think about the concept of 'penis envy' as something other than extremely lazy and laughably unbiological.
My thinking until now: It's not a 'lack of penis' or a 'void.' You'd know that effortlessly if you had one. It's deeply unscientific to think that females are unwhole males. (More recent science shows that the female body is the default, and the male body develops out of it at certain non-zero point in embryonic growth. If something goes wrong with the maleness, the embryo tries to convert back to female -- and so an XY person can arrive at birth as a female person.) This lack of ability to imagine a person different from you in any way other than in relation to you (even in the language: the word 'female' as a prefixed version of the word 'male') is also, I have to assume, what makes men tune out of books or movies that don't have men for protags, and makes them, fittingly or ironically, seem like unwhole, unsmart people to me. What Freud is probably observing, when he describes the phenomenon of 'penis envy,' is the feeling of jealousy that can be a girl's reaction to realizing that boys have better lives than she does. A lot of girls do begin to wish that they were boys, because it is obvious from a very young age that boys have it easier and get to do more. Wishing you were a boy is just wishing you were a first-class citizen -- it only has to do with a penis insofar as the very young girl might understand this as the fundamental difference between herself and a first-class citizen. Not that girls universally do: tomboyism (a group of behaviors and modes of dress) can be a reaction to the gender differences between people who are first-class citizens and people like her.
Janet, in The Silent Woman: "The premise of the story--that a woman's life can be poisoned, and even ultimately destroyed, by her feelings of inadequacy in the face of a man's superior achievements--is as farfetched and remote from observable experience as the Freudian concept of penis envy. And as true. (Freud's concept, of course, is not simply about anatomical difference but about what that difference connotes; it is a description of phallocentrism, not a recommendation of it.)"
Ah! It falls open. It seemed like I was disagreeing with it, but according to Janet I was just paraphrasing it. So maybe I could grow to value Freud more as long as I have Janet to explain him to me. Which may be part of why I enjoyed the book so much, despite finding Freud bullshitty on its face.
Literary people and theory people are much more drawn to Freud than therapy people are. I think it's because his interpretations are beautiful, helpful, and sometimes correct, but they won't really fix or change your lived life. That's why I come back to interest in him despite my Oedipal reticence. Child sexuality is a worthy idea. Early life having a lasting, maybe even tyrannical effect on adult personality is a worthy idea. A post-Freudianism that understands patriarchy, misogyny, gender fluidity: I'm very primed for this. Maybe I just need to read Freud closer and deeper until he seems to be saying what I already think. Is that all interpretation is?
Read next: Dora, Winnicott on the Child, the rest of The Silent Woman
[aaron speaking] "[...] The older man saw the succession as the younger generation coming to cut off his member, and the younger man, who wanted the position, saw it in terms of cutting off the older man's member--thus his indecision. So they were very much in sync with each other in this Oedipal drama. Which exists only on a fantasy level. Because the fact is, it's a job. It's just a job! So is being a training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic. That's the funny thing about it all. Why can't adults deal with these things in terms of objective realities?"
"But if the job were seen for what it is--for the poor thing it is--who would want to do it?"
"That's just it. What are the sources of motivation and pleasure? The sources of motivation and pleasure are infantile wishes."
"Psychoanalysis, alone among today's psychotherapies, remains strictly a talking cure. Even the most far-out theorist will confine himself to telling his patients what he believes to be true about them, rather than attempting to manipulate or act on them."
I think I would like to be analyzed, more than just about any other type of therapy, for the reasons in the quotes above. The problem, though, is that fundamentally I think I'm a non-believer in the universality of the Oedipus-complex as a trauma that befalls all 3-5 year-old people and causes all of their neuroses for the rest of their lives. Whereas the avant-garde theorist of this book, the "object-relations person," believes that the "house" (as in, "man is not even master of his own house") is built earlier, in infancy, I feel like I can trace most of my personality problems to traumatic events in puberty, and would enjoy a form of therapy that focused around analyzing those memories. Maybe this is a complete misunderstanding of analysis. Because it's supposed to involve recovery of pre-memory memories. Maybe I just want to believe that being interpreted and metaphorized can be helpful as well as pleasurable, but am not actually receptive to being interpreted according to this orthodoxy. Freud on gender is too much of an essentialist failure for his Oedipal idea to really function all the way down, for me.
Maybe for Janet too. She does a good job being "journalistic" -- not seeming to pass judgment in her phrasing, even when she is. From the book: "Invariably, the cause of the trouble, the start of the debility, is traced back to childhood--to a particular, fateful, universal experience called the Oedipal complex. The complex describes the shattering, by fear of castration, of a small boy's dream of making love to his mother, and the formation of the superego as a permanent memorial to his dread. 'The paradoxical proposition that the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows' (as Freud wrote in The Ego and the Id) arises from this dire early experience. Freud's association of morality with castration anxiety--"the little lover" of four or five gives up his ambitions toward his mother fast, and forever, when 'more or less plainly, more or less brutally, a threat is pronounced that this part of him which he values so highly will be taken away from him'--led him to the inescapable conclusion that women, to whom the worst had already happened, must be less moral than men."
Two (or three -- 1a and 2a are the same thing phrased in opposite directions) things wrong: 1. Women are morally inferior to men for a biologically-based reason. (1a. Women are biologically-based anything.) 2. Female people are castrated male people. (2a. Female people = women.) Yet Janet is also the first person to make me think about the concept of 'penis envy' as something other than extremely lazy and laughably unbiological.
My thinking until now: It's not a 'lack of penis' or a 'void.' You'd know that effortlessly if you had one. It's deeply unscientific to think that females are unwhole males. (More recent science shows that the female body is the default, and the male body develops out of it at certain non-zero point in embryonic growth. If something goes wrong with the maleness, the embryo tries to convert back to female -- and so an XY person can arrive at birth as a female person.) This lack of ability to imagine a person different from you in any way other than in relation to you (even in the language: the word 'female' as a prefixed version of the word 'male') is also, I have to assume, what makes men tune out of books or movies that don't have men for protags, and makes them, fittingly or ironically, seem like unwhole, unsmart people to me. What Freud is probably observing, when he describes the phenomenon of 'penis envy,' is the feeling of jealousy that can be a girl's reaction to realizing that boys have better lives than she does. A lot of girls do begin to wish that they were boys, because it is obvious from a very young age that boys have it easier and get to do more. Wishing you were a boy is just wishing you were a first-class citizen -- it only has to do with a penis insofar as the very young girl might understand this as the fundamental difference between herself and a first-class citizen. Not that girls universally do: tomboyism (a group of behaviors and modes of dress) can be a reaction to the gender differences between people who are first-class citizens and people like her.
Janet, in The Silent Woman: "The premise of the story--that a woman's life can be poisoned, and even ultimately destroyed, by her feelings of inadequacy in the face of a man's superior achievements--is as farfetched and remote from observable experience as the Freudian concept of penis envy. And as true. (Freud's concept, of course, is not simply about anatomical difference but about what that difference connotes; it is a description of phallocentrism, not a recommendation of it.)"
Ah! It falls open. It seemed like I was disagreeing with it, but according to Janet I was just paraphrasing it. So maybe I could grow to value Freud more as long as I have Janet to explain him to me. Which may be part of why I enjoyed the book so much, despite finding Freud bullshitty on its face.
Literary people and theory people are much more drawn to Freud than therapy people are. I think it's because his interpretations are beautiful, helpful, and sometimes correct, but they won't really fix or change your lived life. That's why I come back to interest in him despite my Oedipal reticence. Child sexuality is a worthy idea. Early life having a lasting, maybe even tyrannical effect on adult personality is a worthy idea. A post-Freudianism that understands patriarchy, misogyny, gender fluidity: I'm very primed for this. Maybe I just need to read Freud closer and deeper until he seems to be saying what I already think. Is that all interpretation is?
Read next: Dora, Winnicott on the Child, the rest of The Silent Woman
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September 5, 2024“You read it with a growing sense of irritation, confusion, disorientation, and ennui, alternating with excitement. Something nags at you as you read, like a forgotten word. And something seems familiar about your impatience and boredom: it is the impatience produced by other people’s dreams.” JM on Dora
It would be too easy to say that Janet Malcom approaches psychoanalysis with the proper dose of skepticism. It’s not so much skepticism as it is how a brilliant, inquisitive person should approach anything.
Much is about the inside baseball of the psychoanalysis community based in New York/what it’s like being a psychoanalyst generally (training and practicing). But she takes it a step further and approaches the book seemingly with the goal to take a psychoanalyst at their word and explore the profession with the same mode of thinking that they would approach a patient. To psychoanalyze the analysts themselves.
The book is set up as part history of Freuds discoveries and part profile of an anonymous analyst. But as the book goes on, Malcom as interviewer begins to take on the meta personality of the analyst (the interviewer as a listener and the subject as the patient).
It’s easy to see how her other writing is influenced by Freud, specifically journalist and the murderer.
If a person was looking for a dense and concise history of psychoanalysis I would send to any Jameson Webster talk and the first 50 pages of this book. The rest is a deep, circular, mind bendingly dense exploration of analysis in practice with a sometimes intense amount of theory.
Was bored at times but these days I’m into boredom.
It would be too easy to say that Janet Malcom approaches psychoanalysis with the proper dose of skepticism. It’s not so much skepticism as it is how a brilliant, inquisitive person should approach anything.
Much is about the inside baseball of the psychoanalysis community based in New York/what it’s like being a psychoanalyst generally (training and practicing). But she takes it a step further and approaches the book seemingly with the goal to take a psychoanalyst at their word and explore the profession with the same mode of thinking that they would approach a patient. To psychoanalyze the analysts themselves.
The book is set up as part history of Freuds discoveries and part profile of an anonymous analyst. But as the book goes on, Malcom as interviewer begins to take on the meta personality of the analyst (the interviewer as a listener and the subject as the patient).
It’s easy to see how her other writing is influenced by Freud, specifically journalist and the murderer.
If a person was looking for a dense and concise history of psychoanalysis I would send to any Jameson Webster talk and the first 50 pages of this book. The rest is a deep, circular, mind bendingly dense exploration of analysis in practice with a sometimes intense amount of theory.
Was bored at times but these days I’m into boredom.
June 28, 2021
Janet Malcolm wrote an incredibly readable and frightfully well-researched piece on psychoanalysis, its fraught narcissism of small differences, the uncertainty of its benefits, and the ways in which even those who analyze for a living sometimes have even less insight than those analysands who step into their offices. A great read; it came to me by way of Anna Khachiyan of Red Scare and has certainly been the most breezy read I’ve picked up from that podcast’s recommendations thus far.
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February 6, 2025Remarkable, though one of our leading luminaries would disagree. “A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. ‘Only connect,’ E. M. Forster proposed. ‘Only we can't,’ the psychoanalyst knows.”
June 6, 2025
A peek into the magic and inherent challenges of the talking cure. Exceptional writing and a fascinating analyst really make this a special read. ✨
September 3, 2024
Janet Malcolm is a fantastic writer, will be reading more
November 24, 2024
As a working young psychoanalyst in 2024, this book was utterly captivating, fascinating, and illuminating. So much on psychoanalysis has changed (but has it?)… and it’s always wonderful to go back to the roots and fundamental principles of what Freud and the early analysts created.
December 14, 2021
Janet Malcom’s book on psychoanalysis, aptly titled, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, is a highly readable account why it is impossible. Here she traces the evolution of Freud’s thought and practice and extends it to the thought and practice of an analyst in New York to whom she gives the name Aaron Green, M.D. In a sense this is a book similar to “Inside the Masons,” or something like that, because it seeks to penetrate a kind of cult or with a special code of symbols and rituals, a major difference being the magnitude of Freud’s singular discoveries and the seriousness with which some very serious people regard psychoanalysis.
Green’s psychoanalytic practice is of the New York school variety. He receives a few patients for an hour a day five days a week. After a brief introduction/orientation, the patients lie down on the couch, Greene behind them, and free associate. There are some likely candidates for psychoanalysis, generally neurotics, and some carefully avoided candidates, generally psychotics. Psychoanalysis, in other words, isn’t for everyone.
The idea is that through the swirl of uncensored speech a patient can penetrate the defenses and evasions she developed during the earliest months and years of life and come to grips with an unencumbered ego, a self, a human entity with a reasonable degree of autonomy and personal freedom.
Malcom discovers that such outcomes rarely occur. More likely, patients abandon psychoanalysis, move away from their analysts, can’t pay for it anymore, etc. These incomplete outcomes are not always failures, but there is no question that they have fallen short.
There is a great deal of infighting within and among psychoanalytic institutes, be they in New York or San Francisco or elsewhere. Freud’s thought is nudged along, deviations are sanctioned or repudiated, big battles are fought over seemingly tiny pieces of psychological geography. Ostracism awaits heretics. For example, two famous psychoanalysts became erotically involved with their patients; they quickly were stripped of positions and honors within the hierarchy because their sin was against a central psychoanalytic dynamic, which is as follows: All patients with any chance of success will fall in love with their analysts by means of a process of transference, i.e., projecting their misperceptions of reality onto their caregivers. This is essential; transference rips away many delusions when the analyst recognizes what is going on and countertransfers reality-inducing messages, leading the patient to recognize the fictiveness of her feelings. That is a major moment, cracking the eggshell of projections in which we all live to one degree or another.
This is grueling work for the analyst and the patient. Imagine the burden if you spoke about yourself to someone for an hour every weekday for several years. That must be galling. Wouldn’t you frustrate and bore yourself to the point of abandoning your narcissism, or your inability to stay married, or keep a job, or surrender your most cherished obsessions and compulsions just to enjoy the pleasure of shutting your mouth?
To make the medicine even more bitter, classical psychoanalysts like Green give their patients little direction. They don’t say much. They reveal as little about themselves as possible. Their job is to offer very little guidance until they recognize the offending patterns in the drivel, spot their ripeness, and only then proceed to a harvest...four years later...five years later...even more.
Freud’s influence is as indisputable as it is contestable. The educated world knows his terms and insights, but the number of people who have been part of the psychoanalytic world is infinitesimally small, either as analysts or patients. But there is an allure to psychoanalysis that persists, perhaps because most of us know that we don’t know all there is to know about ourselves, our desires, our conflicts, our aversions. So we will find Malcom’s book quite interesting even as we agree with her conclusion that psychoanalysis ultimately is impossible; it’s not scientific; it’s beyond measurement, it’s an unproven and unprovable proposition. And yet highly educated, very intelligent men like Aaron Green swear by it, and that’s intriguing. What does he think he knows that we don’t know?
Green’s psychoanalytic practice is of the New York school variety. He receives a few patients for an hour a day five days a week. After a brief introduction/orientation, the patients lie down on the couch, Greene behind them, and free associate. There are some likely candidates for psychoanalysis, generally neurotics, and some carefully avoided candidates, generally psychotics. Psychoanalysis, in other words, isn’t for everyone.
The idea is that through the swirl of uncensored speech a patient can penetrate the defenses and evasions she developed during the earliest months and years of life and come to grips with an unencumbered ego, a self, a human entity with a reasonable degree of autonomy and personal freedom.
Malcom discovers that such outcomes rarely occur. More likely, patients abandon psychoanalysis, move away from their analysts, can’t pay for it anymore, etc. These incomplete outcomes are not always failures, but there is no question that they have fallen short.
There is a great deal of infighting within and among psychoanalytic institutes, be they in New York or San Francisco or elsewhere. Freud’s thought is nudged along, deviations are sanctioned or repudiated, big battles are fought over seemingly tiny pieces of psychological geography. Ostracism awaits heretics. For example, two famous psychoanalysts became erotically involved with their patients; they quickly were stripped of positions and honors within the hierarchy because their sin was against a central psychoanalytic dynamic, which is as follows: All patients with any chance of success will fall in love with their analysts by means of a process of transference, i.e., projecting their misperceptions of reality onto their caregivers. This is essential; transference rips away many delusions when the analyst recognizes what is going on and countertransfers reality-inducing messages, leading the patient to recognize the fictiveness of her feelings. That is a major moment, cracking the eggshell of projections in which we all live to one degree or another.
This is grueling work for the analyst and the patient. Imagine the burden if you spoke about yourself to someone for an hour every weekday for several years. That must be galling. Wouldn’t you frustrate and bore yourself to the point of abandoning your narcissism, or your inability to stay married, or keep a job, or surrender your most cherished obsessions and compulsions just to enjoy the pleasure of shutting your mouth?
To make the medicine even more bitter, classical psychoanalysts like Green give their patients little direction. They don’t say much. They reveal as little about themselves as possible. Their job is to offer very little guidance until they recognize the offending patterns in the drivel, spot their ripeness, and only then proceed to a harvest...four years later...five years later...even more.
Freud’s influence is as indisputable as it is contestable. The educated world knows his terms and insights, but the number of people who have been part of the psychoanalytic world is infinitesimally small, either as analysts or patients. But there is an allure to psychoanalysis that persists, perhaps because most of us know that we don’t know all there is to know about ourselves, our desires, our conflicts, our aversions. So we will find Malcom’s book quite interesting even as we agree with her conclusion that psychoanalysis ultimately is impossible; it’s not scientific; it’s beyond measurement, it’s an unproven and unprovable proposition. And yet highly educated, very intelligent men like Aaron Green swear by it, and that’s intriguing. What does he think he knows that we don’t know?
August 9, 2023
“‘What would you call an interpersonal relationship where infantile wishes, and defenses against those wishes, get expressed in such a way that the persons within that relationship don’t see each other for what they objectively are but, rather, view each other in terms of their infantile needs and their infantile conflicts? What would you call that?’
‘I’d call that life.’”
4 stars.
‘I’d call that life.’”
4 stars.
February 28, 2025
Good clean fun
July 29, 2021
"Soon after the Big Bang of Freud's major discoveries--around the time of the Clark lectures--the historian of psychoanalysis notes a fork in the road. One path leads outward into the general culture, widening to become the grand boulevard of psychoanalytic influence--the multilane superhighway of psychoanalytic thought's incursions into psychiatry, social philosophy, anthropology, law, literature, education, and child-rearing. The other is the narrow, inward-turning path of psychoanalytic therapy: a hidden, almost secret by-way travelled by few (the analysts and their patients), edged by decrepit mansions with drawn shades (the training institutes and the analytic societies), marked with inscrutable road signs (the scientific papers)--the road along which Aaron Green is trudging. As for Freud himself, he travelled both routes, extending the psychoanalytic view to literature, art, biography, anthropology, and social philosophy in works such as LEONARDO DA VINCI, TOTEM AND TABOO, GROUP PSYCHOLOGY and MOSES AND MONOTHEISM, as well as sticking to the theoretical and clinical core of psychoanalysis" (23).
"As Freud groped his way toward the complexities of ego psychology, he was obliged to modify this simple view of human fallibility--to see that illness and character were not, after all, discrete--but, significantly, he never changed his profoundly amoral view of psychoanalytic therapy. 'Transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness' (STUDIES ON HYSTERIA) remained the ungarnished program, with no frills added of 'self-improvement' or 'fulfillment,' which such revisionists as Alfred Adler, Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney were to covertly offer their patients. Herbert Marcuse, in his 'Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism' (the epilogue to his book EROS AND CIVILIZATION), icily examines the tone of uplift and the Power of Positive Thinking that pervades the revisionists' writings, and mocks their claim to scientific seriousness" (27-28).
"'Don't things always look better from the outside?" I said.
Aaron agreed. 'I used to have a symptom. I used to have social anxiety before going to parties. Parties, you know, are highly instinctualized things. Well, the symptom fell away during my analysis, and now I go to parties, and they're so mundane.'
'The best parties are the ones you're not invited to.'" (61).
"I had read a writeup of the young woman's case which Aaron had prepared for the American Psychoanalytic Association as a prerequisite for certification and membership, and had found it baffling, irritating, boring, insulting to women, and self-damning. In its unrelenting pursuit of sexual matter and meaning, it brought to mind the Dora case, in which Freud often conducted himself more like a police inspector interrogating a suspect than like a doctor helping a patient. 'Aha!' Freud would say to poor Dora, an attractive and intelligent eighteen-year-old girl suffering from a nervous cough, migraine, and a kind of general youthful malaise. 'Aha! I know about you. I know your dirty little secrets. Admit that you were secretly attracted to Herr K. Admit that you masturbated when you were five. Look at what you're doing now as you lie there playing with your reticule-opening it, putting a finger into it, shutting it again!' I sensed some of the same badgering and needling quality in Aaron's case history. I asked him whether his own behavior might not have provoked some of the girl's belligerence and antagonism" (73).
"I thought of George Orwell's 'Reflections on Gandhi,' in which he objected to the side of Gandhi's nature that permitted him to do the moral equivalent of throwing the boy into the pot in the name of a higher ideal. To Orwell, there was no higher ideal than the humanistic one. 'The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals,' Orwell wrote with moving irascibility. To the notion that the ordinary man is a failed saint, Orwell retorted, 'Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings" (80).
"The people who work well with schizophrenics are people whose center of gravity is a bit displaced, who can make another person the center of their lives, who are endowed with an unusual measure of intuitiveness and sensitivity and kindliness. Ferenczi was such a person--his empathy reached the magnitude of genius, and he was a man of great personal kindness" (109-110).
"I believe that Brenner's view will prevail, because, for all its apparent harshness and reductionism, it contains a more profound and complex and interesting statement about human nature than any of the revisionist views do. To say 'Man is not an animal' is to say nothing that banal people haven't always said. To say that our essential humanity resides in precisely that part of our nature which is most instinctual, primitive, and infantile--*animal*--is to say something radical" (120).
"But implicit in even the most avant-garde position is a belief in a basic experience called psychoanalysis--a belief in its unique efficacy with mental suffering and in the (homeopathic) idea of curing suffering with suffering. to do its profound and searing work on the soul, analysis must be an ordeal. ('Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely' Freud wrote in 'Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy'.)" (126).
"Aaron and I had been talking about the difference between case histories and literature, and I said of the Chekhov story that it illustrated something that case histories don't allow for--namely, the profound effect that people can have on each other, the fateful difference that a meeting between two people can make on the outcome of their lives" (145).
"Cases that formally terminate--i.e., end by mutual agreement of analyst and patient--are relatively rare. The majority of analytic cases end because the patient moves to another city, or runs out of money, or impulsively quits the analysis, or agrees with the analyst that stalemate has been reached" (151-152).
"It says, as Freud wrote, that man isn't master in his own house. That he is determined, that his degree of freedom is zero, that he cannot change his destiny, that he is malleable at one formidable time and that everything in his life is settled and preordained ever after. Yes, it's a horrible idea to have to accept. And we analysts take it for common knowledge, and when we talk among ourselves it's a basic assumption derived from a tremendous amount of evidence" (159).
"As Freud groped his way toward the complexities of ego psychology, he was obliged to modify this simple view of human fallibility--to see that illness and character were not, after all, discrete--but, significantly, he never changed his profoundly amoral view of psychoanalytic therapy. 'Transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness' (STUDIES ON HYSTERIA) remained the ungarnished program, with no frills added of 'self-improvement' or 'fulfillment,' which such revisionists as Alfred Adler, Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney were to covertly offer their patients. Herbert Marcuse, in his 'Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism' (the epilogue to his book EROS AND CIVILIZATION), icily examines the tone of uplift and the Power of Positive Thinking that pervades the revisionists' writings, and mocks their claim to scientific seriousness" (27-28).
"'Don't things always look better from the outside?" I said.
Aaron agreed. 'I used to have a symptom. I used to have social anxiety before going to parties. Parties, you know, are highly instinctualized things. Well, the symptom fell away during my analysis, and now I go to parties, and they're so mundane.'
'The best parties are the ones you're not invited to.'" (61).
"I had read a writeup of the young woman's case which Aaron had prepared for the American Psychoanalytic Association as a prerequisite for certification and membership, and had found it baffling, irritating, boring, insulting to women, and self-damning. In its unrelenting pursuit of sexual matter and meaning, it brought to mind the Dora case, in which Freud often conducted himself more like a police inspector interrogating a suspect than like a doctor helping a patient. 'Aha!' Freud would say to poor Dora, an attractive and intelligent eighteen-year-old girl suffering from a nervous cough, migraine, and a kind of general youthful malaise. 'Aha! I know about you. I know your dirty little secrets. Admit that you were secretly attracted to Herr K. Admit that you masturbated when you were five. Look at what you're doing now as you lie there playing with your reticule-opening it, putting a finger into it, shutting it again!' I sensed some of the same badgering and needling quality in Aaron's case history. I asked him whether his own behavior might not have provoked some of the girl's belligerence and antagonism" (73).
"I thought of George Orwell's 'Reflections on Gandhi,' in which he objected to the side of Gandhi's nature that permitted him to do the moral equivalent of throwing the boy into the pot in the name of a higher ideal. To Orwell, there was no higher ideal than the humanistic one. 'The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals,' Orwell wrote with moving irascibility. To the notion that the ordinary man is a failed saint, Orwell retorted, 'Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings" (80).
"The people who work well with schizophrenics are people whose center of gravity is a bit displaced, who can make another person the center of their lives, who are endowed with an unusual measure of intuitiveness and sensitivity and kindliness. Ferenczi was such a person--his empathy reached the magnitude of genius, and he was a man of great personal kindness" (109-110).
"I believe that Brenner's view will prevail, because, for all its apparent harshness and reductionism, it contains a more profound and complex and interesting statement about human nature than any of the revisionist views do. To say 'Man is not an animal' is to say nothing that banal people haven't always said. To say that our essential humanity resides in precisely that part of our nature which is most instinctual, primitive, and infantile--*animal*--is to say something radical" (120).
"But implicit in even the most avant-garde position is a belief in a basic experience called psychoanalysis--a belief in its unique efficacy with mental suffering and in the (homeopathic) idea of curing suffering with suffering. to do its profound and searing work on the soul, analysis must be an ordeal. ('Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely' Freud wrote in 'Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy'.)" (126).
"Aaron and I had been talking about the difference between case histories and literature, and I said of the Chekhov story that it illustrated something that case histories don't allow for--namely, the profound effect that people can have on each other, the fateful difference that a meeting between two people can make on the outcome of their lives" (145).
"Cases that formally terminate--i.e., end by mutual agreement of analyst and patient--are relatively rare. The majority of analytic cases end because the patient moves to another city, or runs out of money, or impulsively quits the analysis, or agrees with the analyst that stalemate has been reached" (151-152).
"It says, as Freud wrote, that man isn't master in his own house. That he is determined, that his degree of freedom is zero, that he cannot change his destiny, that he is malleable at one formidable time and that everything in his life is settled and preordained ever after. Yes, it's a horrible idea to have to accept. And we analysts take it for common knowledge, and when we talk among ourselves it's a basic assumption derived from a tremendous amount of evidence" (159).
March 5, 2019
Psychoanalysis must be one of the strangest professions, and even though the classical Freudian analysis has been in decline since the 1960s, I am still fascinated by it. Imagine a life where you listen to the same two dozen or so patients for an hour at a time, several times a week. Where you have to keep your distance and be neutral, but where you have to be constantly attentive to anything your patients might say that could indicate a past trauma or defense mechanism. And that's just your daily life - on top of that, the professional society that you belong to, is usually secretive, insular and locked in deadly theoretical combat with other professional societies. The top of your profession is being allowed to become a training analyst, meaning that you get to analyse people who want to become analysts themselves. And this is a jealously guarded privilege... Oh, and by the way, the prospect of helping the patient is secondary. The idea seems to be : this is about achieving self-insight (with the help of the analyst) - and improvement should then follow. But the improvement itself is not the primary driver, understanding is. And that could take years to achieve - can you think of a profession that is more out of sync with modern times?!
Granted, this book is from the 1980s, and I have no idea what the profession looks like today. But this was a fascinating foray into a profession, an activity, a therapeutic approach that seems to have changed very little over the past 100 years. Janet Malcolm writes very well, and she makes the topic so interesting that you'd want to read every article and book she mentions- but my tolerance for Oedipus complex and object-relations was limited, so I was happy that this was a shorter book.
Granted, this book is from the 1980s, and I have no idea what the profession looks like today. But this was a fascinating foray into a profession, an activity, a therapeutic approach that seems to have changed very little over the past 100 years. Janet Malcolm writes very well, and she makes the topic so interesting that you'd want to read every article and book she mentions- but my tolerance for Oedipus complex and object-relations was limited, so I was happy that this was a shorter book.
April 18, 2013
Be wary of this book. It will have you hunting down papers and buying more books as Malcolm weaves tantalising references throughout her tale of Freudian psychoanalysis. Malcolm intersperses her own reading/research with her interview of "Aaron Green" a graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. The interview offers fascinating glimpses into the world of Freudian psychoanalysis in an oftentimes gossipy fashion and not all flattering to psychoanalysts. A thoroughly enjoyable read.
February 22, 2025
I started reading this after listening to an interview with Orna (couples therapy) in which she’s protective of psychoanalysis as a profession and deeply welded to the technique. This book- and psychoanalysis - is so interesting. Malcolm is a brilliant writer and thinker, and delivers insight after insight about the baffling, deeply odd, insular, hard-to-pin-down, maddening and yet still somehow irresistible profession of psychoanalysis. She examines how the schools of thought have developed, starting from Freud’s obsession with the Oedipal complex being the root of everything, to Winncott and Kohut’s theory of maternal neglect being at the root of it all. Malcolm’s overall thesis is that this profession is truly impossible - from the people to the objective to the technique to the circular arguments - and yet has achieved some undeniable results and had major impacts on therapeutic methods today and our overall societal understanding of mental health and mental disorders. In particular I was struck by:
- Malcolm’s critical yet fair-minded reading of Freud…and how transference was such a key theory of his. Malcolm posits that Freud invented transference to explain the confusing feelings he may have had toward his female patients (Freud was in fact much more rigid than his peers in showing any affection or even compassion to his female patients). So is transference real or just a convenient theory he invented to avoid facing his own (deplorable to him) feelings?
- shocking to discover that the overt purpose of psychoanalysis as originally put forth by Freud and the hard liners (Brenner) is to get rid of “neurotic issues” and cross the line into “just regular unhappiness.” So interesting to juxtapose this with the common therapeutic purpose today, which is to feel better! In fact, patients who stopped analysis when they felt better were considered “therapeutic failures” since they didn’t push further to the root of the issues. And also…the absolute weirdness of doing 5x a week analysis for years and years on end?!
- the impassivity of analysts and how important that is to the treatment…and the ways in which more recent schools of thought have deviated from this. I am so curious to understand what a true hard liner psychoanalysis session would look like today.
- it’s all a bit….of a stretch? Scary to think that “man is not the master of his own house.” And yet Freud & co are as usual way ahead of this, claiming that this all sounds like bullshit until one has been through the process themselves. It’s a bit culty
- the descriptions of the NY psychoanalytic institute and the power structures, insular social circles, etc were fascinating.
Ultimately, I think there’s truth to some of it but could truly spin myself in circles arguing both sides- the “impossible profession” descriptor is apt. I will be reading more about this though, I want to dig into Freud, because it is so interesting.
- Malcolm’s critical yet fair-minded reading of Freud…and how transference was such a key theory of his. Malcolm posits that Freud invented transference to explain the confusing feelings he may have had toward his female patients (Freud was in fact much more rigid than his peers in showing any affection or even compassion to his female patients). So is transference real or just a convenient theory he invented to avoid facing his own (deplorable to him) feelings?
- shocking to discover that the overt purpose of psychoanalysis as originally put forth by Freud and the hard liners (Brenner) is to get rid of “neurotic issues” and cross the line into “just regular unhappiness.” So interesting to juxtapose this with the common therapeutic purpose today, which is to feel better! In fact, patients who stopped analysis when they felt better were considered “therapeutic failures” since they didn’t push further to the root of the issues. And also…the absolute weirdness of doing 5x a week analysis for years and years on end?!
- the impassivity of analysts and how important that is to the treatment…and the ways in which more recent schools of thought have deviated from this. I am so curious to understand what a true hard liner psychoanalysis session would look like today.
- it’s all a bit….of a stretch? Scary to think that “man is not the master of his own house.” And yet Freud & co are as usual way ahead of this, claiming that this all sounds like bullshit until one has been through the process themselves. It’s a bit culty
- the descriptions of the NY psychoanalytic institute and the power structures, insular social circles, etc were fascinating.
Ultimately, I think there’s truth to some of it but could truly spin myself in circles arguing both sides- the “impossible profession” descriptor is apt. I will be reading more about this though, I want to dig into Freud, because it is so interesting.
November 1, 2024
It's an interesting book that's worth it only if you've known something about psychoanalysis before. Only something though -- the book does a neat job of bringing the ideas of psychoanalysis onto a conversational level. Janet Malcolm writes very well. Many of the ideas she talks about stick.
From my perspective, I've always felt that there are some insights to be gleaned from psychoanalysis but I've never found the road the psychoanalysts took to be useful. The fact that only so many patients actually benefit from the treatment gnaws at the claims that psychoanalysis reveals a universal truth. To give an analogy it feels like the psychoanalyst community has made a hammer that's very useful, but only if you have a nail. It actually makes a lot more sense that it's one of the lenses used by people studying literature to understand a text.
From my perspective, I've always felt that there are some insights to be gleaned from psychoanalysis but I've never found the road the psychoanalysts took to be useful. The fact that only so many patients actually benefit from the treatment gnaws at the claims that psychoanalysis reveals a universal truth. To give an analogy it feels like the psychoanalyst community has made a hammer that's very useful, but only if you have a nail. It actually makes a lot more sense that it's one of the lenses used by people studying literature to understand a text.
October 9, 2025
a profile of classical freudianism from the lens of a true believer, written at a time when such beliefs were facing steep competition. not sure how effective a primer the book would be for someone new to freud; i appreciated it more for adding nuance and color to my understanding. loved the exploration of why ppl become and continue work as analysts — and how dehumanizing or regressive the job can be, ironically. prefer freud’s descendants b d didn’t feel the point of the book was to judge / settle somewhere.
May 8, 2022
A short book and a library book at that, so I have made myself read it over just a couple of days. Also, I had, during a recent course of reading the New Yorker pieces of Janet Malcolm, read the article that underlay this book, which expands on it significantly, so I was somewhat familiar with sections of it. I love Malcolm's writing, and even made a trip to the Argosy Bookshop in the happy summer of 2021, post-vax, pre-Delta, because I loved the piece she wrote about it so much.
I found myself wondering as I read this book by the redoubtable Janet Malcolm, who seems to be able to write about anything, when I first encountered the idea of therapy, both Freudian and/or other schools of thought. I expect it was, as with so many common cultural ideas when I was growing up, through Bugs Bunny cartoons. I think I can recall BB either acting as a therapist to Elmer Fudd (perhaps speaking in a Viennese accent) or being an analysand himself, or possibly switching back and forth between the two roles. (ha! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USkSZ... here is one example at least, there may be more)
This book specifically addresses strict Freudian analysis, in which the analyst sits unseen by the patient who is encouraged to talk freely about whatever comes to mind. This sort of therapy was probably always rare, and now with other modes more popular, as well as the introduction of medication to help alleviate psychological suffering, I expect it barely exists anywhere, except perhaps in New York, Los Angeles, and London. The idea of having someone for years listen to you, and the assumption (by the theory of analysis) that during that process the person will have transference (which seems basically to be falling in love and alternatively in hate with the analyst), is fascinating to me. The intense attention on the part of one person to anything you have to say, and they forbidden to moralize or disapprove or approve seems like an extraordinary embarkation on the part of the pair doing it. I think underlying this work is the assumption objective attention must be paid because the parents weren't able to provide it.
Malcolm is a journalist and asks many questions and challenges ideas presented to her both through readings and interviews, especially with the young--43=-at the time the book was written, the late 70s, early 80s--analyst who agrees to be part of her project. The book was published in 1981, and it's hard for me to accept, truly, that "Aaron Green" would now be, if he's still alive, 84 years old! He was a "true believer" in the Freudian technique, and wouldn't it be fascinating to learn if he remained steadfast, or if he transformed in his work over the years, with so many changes in the medical profession and in therapy itself.
A few ideas of particular interest in my reading:
--She uses a beautiful metaphor to describe the early, almost joyful works of Freud as Beethoven's bagatelles, in contrast to his late, dark and solemn work as the late Beethoven's quartets. I would never ever have that that kind of thought, and I think it's an example of what Forster must have meant by saying "only connect," (yes, connect with people, but also connect ideas that seem disparate)
--the analyst must be entirely tolerant of the patient, even if they are painfully boring or morally repugnant. And the analyst must always want to know more, and say "Tell me more about that"--that's a very high standard to maintain, one I don't think we even expect of our "loves" or friendships...and it's a complete reworking of the confession idea in the Catholic Church, now that I think of it
--in a section near the end of the book, Malcolm writes about the process of terminating therapy formally (as opposed to a patient simply quitting and declining to come any more). It is a process for both sides of the pair, and a painful one. The tendency is to avoid it, and in writing about it I was struck that it is a kind of agreed upon death/loss. And whoever does THAT willingly? The only way to end a relationship successfully is to talk about it and acknowledge there is no relief from suffering. And generally that probing seems rare in life. It's just simply too easy to walk away
I gave this 4 stars because the beginning of the book has a long and for me somewhat tedious section about the history of Freudian thought and the objections and changes to it through other schools. I expect a Freudian therapist would say I'm resisting the groundwork! I'm too cheap to go through this kind of therapy , and the money aspect is a huge part of it--there is some info from Winnicott (a therapist who has appeal for me because he's the "Good Enough Parent" guy) that talks about the analyst setting up an environment of love--the careful listening and undivided attention--and hate--the money, the demand for a strict schedule, the non-negotiable 50 minute hour etc. I wrote when I read it, not hate, but boundaries. But maybe for people like me who won't spend the money, it is an indicator of my lack of love for myself, not being willing to take on the therapeutic process. But I believe I'm the "Good Enough Person," at this point in my life...and havefinally decided not to try to be "Good" in the moral sense anymore, which certainly helps on all fronts (this is all meant somewhat tongue in cheek--don't worry about me!)
I found myself wondering as I read this book by the redoubtable Janet Malcolm, who seems to be able to write about anything, when I first encountered the idea of therapy, both Freudian and/or other schools of thought. I expect it was, as with so many common cultural ideas when I was growing up, through Bugs Bunny cartoons. I think I can recall BB either acting as a therapist to Elmer Fudd (perhaps speaking in a Viennese accent) or being an analysand himself, or possibly switching back and forth between the two roles. (ha! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USkSZ... here is one example at least, there may be more)
This book specifically addresses strict Freudian analysis, in which the analyst sits unseen by the patient who is encouraged to talk freely about whatever comes to mind. This sort of therapy was probably always rare, and now with other modes more popular, as well as the introduction of medication to help alleviate psychological suffering, I expect it barely exists anywhere, except perhaps in New York, Los Angeles, and London. The idea of having someone for years listen to you, and the assumption (by the theory of analysis) that during that process the person will have transference (which seems basically to be falling in love and alternatively in hate with the analyst), is fascinating to me. The intense attention on the part of one person to anything you have to say, and they forbidden to moralize or disapprove or approve seems like an extraordinary embarkation on the part of the pair doing it. I think underlying this work is the assumption objective attention must be paid because the parents weren't able to provide it.
Malcolm is a journalist and asks many questions and challenges ideas presented to her both through readings and interviews, especially with the young--43=-at the time the book was written, the late 70s, early 80s--analyst who agrees to be part of her project. The book was published in 1981, and it's hard for me to accept, truly, that "Aaron Green" would now be, if he's still alive, 84 years old! He was a "true believer" in the Freudian technique, and wouldn't it be fascinating to learn if he remained steadfast, or if he transformed in his work over the years, with so many changes in the medical profession and in therapy itself.
A few ideas of particular interest in my reading:
--She uses a beautiful metaphor to describe the early, almost joyful works of Freud as Beethoven's bagatelles, in contrast to his late, dark and solemn work as the late Beethoven's quartets. I would never ever have that that kind of thought, and I think it's an example of what Forster must have meant by saying "only connect," (yes, connect with people, but also connect ideas that seem disparate)
--the analyst must be entirely tolerant of the patient, even if they are painfully boring or morally repugnant. And the analyst must always want to know more, and say "Tell me more about that"--that's a very high standard to maintain, one I don't think we even expect of our "loves" or friendships...and it's a complete reworking of the confession idea in the Catholic Church, now that I think of it
--in a section near the end of the book, Malcolm writes about the process of terminating therapy formally (as opposed to a patient simply quitting and declining to come any more). It is a process for both sides of the pair, and a painful one. The tendency is to avoid it, and in writing about it I was struck that it is a kind of agreed upon death/loss. And whoever does THAT willingly? The only way to end a relationship successfully is to talk about it and acknowledge there is no relief from suffering. And generally that probing seems rare in life. It's just simply too easy to walk away
I gave this 4 stars because the beginning of the book has a long and for me somewhat tedious section about the history of Freudian thought and the objections and changes to it through other schools. I expect a Freudian therapist would say I'm resisting the groundwork! I'm too cheap to go through this kind of therapy , and the money aspect is a huge part of it--there is some info from Winnicott (a therapist who has appeal for me because he's the "Good Enough Parent" guy) that talks about the analyst setting up an environment of love--the careful listening and undivided attention--and hate--the money, the demand for a strict schedule, the non-negotiable 50 minute hour etc. I wrote when I read it, not hate, but boundaries. But maybe for people like me who won't spend the money, it is an indicator of my lack of love for myself, not being willing to take on the therapeutic process. But I believe I'm the "Good Enough Person," at this point in my life...and havefinally decided not to try to be "Good" in the moral sense anymore, which certainly helps on all fronts (this is all meant somewhat tongue in cheek--don't worry about me!)
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