Psychoanalysis, the Impossible Profession

Janet Malcolm's investigation of psychoanalysis -- expanded from her extraordinary essays in The New Yorker -- is one of the most exciting, elegant, and immensely clarifying books to ever be written on the subject. Here she penetrates the shadowy terminology surrounding analysis to explore that most impersonal of intimate situations through a weaving of her questioning conversations with an orthodox practitioner (a Freudian "purist") and a magisterial, and brilliantly lucid, exploration of the paths of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and influence since Freud. She explores the tragic nature of analysis, the limitations of the "talking cure," and the passions that the analytic relationship -- highly artificial in its awesome abnormality, contradictoriness, and strain -- unleash in both participants. She probes how the role of being a neutral, self-effacing mirror for a patient's self-scrutiny affects a doctor's feelings. She opens up for us the endless obscurities and difficulties of the work, the doubts and anxieties that plague doctors (who tend to blame themselves when an analysis founders and to credit the process when it works), and the traps (hypocrisy, insensitivity, insincerity) that lie in wait for the unwary practitioner. She discusses the tension and bad feeling that so generally pervade analytic organizations, and the nature of education, and of advancement, in the profession. Her talks with "Aaron Green" suggest what kind of temperament is drawn to the unswervingly Freudian style of work. And in the course of their searching exchange, the emotional implications of certain psychoanalytic beliefs become apparent: how "transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness" remains the ungarnished program of analysis, and how profound is the analyst's conviction that the most precious and inviolate of entities -- personal relations -- represent at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Slowly we come to see psychoanalysis as an ambiguous and radical project -- a theatre in which we confront ourselves as the bearers and, in part, the victims of the civilization we have so painfully acquired. This is a fascinating, deeply illuminating book that will be read for years to come.