Janet Malcolm is remembered for the clarity of her vision, and what she saw most acutely was our blindness.
“The phenomenon of transference — how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery,” she writes in the opening pages of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1980). “The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities — personal relations — is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.” Malcolm’s career began in 1963 at the New Yorker, where she covered shopping and children’s literature and wrote a column on home décor. It was not until 1978, after she quit smoking and discovered that she could not sit still without her cigarettes, that she began seriously reporting, producing a long piece on family therapy that would inaugurate her as one of those iconoclast literary reporters that the New Yorker used to reliably produce. By 2023, two years after her death, the critic Charles Finch felt that it was “safe to say that the two most important long-form journalists” of the American 20th century “were Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm.”
The intervening 40 years saw Malcolm cover a wide range of topics — she wrote on politics, the law, crime, and photography, and she produced books on Sylvia Plath, Anton Chekov, and Gertrude Stein — but her subject remained the terrible trouble of personal relations, and psychoanalysis her gravitational core. She returned over and over not only to the profession itself but to the way that psychoanalysis at once appeared to explain and yet could not transcend what Malcolm took to be the central abiding fact of human life: Our self-image is a delusion, and our images of others even more so. “The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other,” Malcolm explained, “We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. 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.”
Psychoanalysis was the first, followed by In the Freud Archives (1983) and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), of an unofficial trilogy on the myopic, a series of elaborations on the tragic consequences of transference and its attendant (self-)deceptions. Or perhaps more accurately, and going a good deal further in explaining why they remain Malcolm’s best-remembered and most precious works, the trilogy was a series of demonstrations of the inevitable fact that even if the psychoanalyst knows, even if the journalist, or the writer, or the lawyer, or the critic, or indeed every one of us, on some subterranean level, knows, we are nevertheless trapped in what the analyst would call a repetition compulsion: We cannot stop believing that we can see ourselves and others as we really are, investing ourselves in that belief, and suffering — exploding or imploding or merely crumbling — when we are inevitably exposed as fools.
“We are all perpetually smoothing and rearranging reality to conform to our wishes; we lie to others and to ourselves constantly, unthinkingly,” Malcolm writes in Freud Archives, “When, occasionally — and not by dint of our own efforts but under the pressure of external events — we are forced to see things as they are, we are like naked people in a storm.” But what else can we do? We might know what we know, but we believe what we must believe. We’re social animals. Malcolm’s books are records of our going to the slaughter and a vision, clearer now than ever, nearly half a century down the road, of slaughters still occurring and yet to come.
In Psychoanalysis, the principal lamb is the pseudonymous New York junior analyst “Aaron Green” and his colleagues in the petty political melodramas of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In Freud Archives, we encounter the fraught and ultimately litigious love triangle between Kurt Eissler, the elderly guardian of Sigmund Freud’s unpublished library, and his two one-time proteges; the autodidact Freud biographer Peter Swales; and the academic Sanskritist-turned-analyst Jeffrey Masson. Each of them projects what he needs onto the other: a mentor, a rival, a friend, a successor, and each, inevitably, finds himself betrayed when the others reveal themselves to be something other than the fantasy each has constructed.
The Journalist and the Murderer, meanwhile, features the masterfully self-deceiving Joe McGinniss and Jeffrey MacDonald progressing from collaborators to close friends to bitter enemies and antagonists in a sensational lawsuit when each finds that the other is unwilling to collaborate in the construction of their irreconcilable fantasies for each other and the book, Fatal Vision, that McGinniss wrote about MacDonald’s trial for the murder of his family. For MacDonald, the betrayal is “the deception that has been practiced on him,” the revelation that “the journalist … never had the slightest intentions of collaborating with him on his own story but always intended to write a story of his own.” For McGinniss, it is MacDonald’s unwillingness to cooperate in the effort to “invalidate MacDonald’s reality and enlist his aid in creating a literary character out himself.” Into their drama step a whole cast of lawyers, psychologists, other journalists, and even Malcolm herself, all of whom attempt to impose their own narrative line onto the uncooperative others and come away bitter and disappointed. So, too, the reader. Perhaps the most insidious and brilliant method by which all three titles reveal Malcolm’s vision is the way they induce us to engage in projections of our own. We encounter these characters, these archetypes of suspect professions, and from our safe, voyeuristic distance, we indulge our own transference fantasies about them. We do this despite Malcolm’s constant reminders that our amusement, our judgment, and even our anger are no freer from the influence of self-serving delusion than those of her characters. In this way, Malcolm is nearly a Socratic figure: By declaring at every turn how incapable we are of seeing others clearly across our solitary oceans of experience, by showing how deluded and ridiculous it is to even try, she is revealed to be the most insightful observer of all.
Even during Malcolm’s heyday in the 1980s and ’90s, the more superficially apparent insight of her books was already a long-standing cultural cliché: Of course, psychology, and especially Freudian psychoanalysis, were bulls***. Deinstitutionalization, the long abolition of the American psychiatric system, began in the 1960s and culminated in 1980, the same year Psychoanalysis went to market. Malcolm’s books are filled with the defensive anger of professionals resentful at an increasingly skeptical public. In the closing pages of Psychoanalysis, Green explodes at Malcolm when she suggests his account of a patient who refused to pay because of her secret wish for a “phallus-child” from him sounds outlandish. “Why can’t the next generation accept what Freud found out?” he asks, “Why not challenge the theory of natural selection?” In Freud Archives, Eissler insists that critics of Freud are little better than jilted lovers: “Freud hurt us,” he tells Malcolm, “he hurt all of us deeply by his findings” and “now there is an attempt to get back at him through the denigration of his character.” Journalism, politics, and the law were faring little better: Journalist is animated by the indignation of lawyers and authors at a jury refusing to accept that it isn’t “lying” if you tell an “untruth” in the service of literature.
What is most striking about Malcolm’s books, particularly at the distance of some 30 years, is not the degree to which they revealed the hypocrisy and silliness of her subjects and their institutions, but how plainly she loved them. It is “the writer’s identification with and affection for the subject,” she wrote in Journalist, “without which the transformation” from life to literature “cannot take place.”
Although the journalist Tom Junod once claimed that few journalists “are more animated by malice than Janet Malcolm,” we see her affection throughout Psychoanalysis, Journalist, and Freud Archives. There is something endearing and playful in her banter with Green, something tender in her admiration for the naïve but deeply moral Eissler, something almost incredulous, but ultimately sincere, in her unambiguously admiring portrayal of Gary Bostwick, attorney for MacDonald. This love does not undermine Malcolm’s well-earned reputation for unsparing criticism — Green is practically yelling at her by the end of Psychoanalysis; Masson sued Malcolm over Freud Archives, and Eissler simply stopped speaking to her; Journalist begins, famously, with the declaration that journalism is “morally indefensible” — but it is what makes her characters, so primed to be objects of pure bathos, into tragedies. She takes them seriously and admires their seriousness, nobody more so than Freud himself. “It was as if a lonely terrorist working in his cellar on a modest explosive device to blow up the local brewery had unaccountably found his way to the hydrogen bomb and blown up half the world,” she writes of his transition from local clinician to world-historical figure. These were righteous and self-righteous people, doomed to self-destruction. The great institutions of human meaning were still tragedy and farce.
Now, the last of that seriousness has left us. A quarter of the way into the 21st century, the degradation of our institutions is complete. Journalism has never seemed so paltry. Politics and the law have been given over almost entirely to the inchoate id. Analysis is dead, and the rump state of psychiatry and “therapy culture” is a perverse combination of narcotics cartel and industrial firm for producing and disseminating cheap, prefabricated acts of transference and delusion for the self-caring consumer. You don’t even need to generate your own misapprehensions about others anymore: Here is how to spot a narcissist, here is how to know that you’re an empath, here is a script for sorting everyone you meet into easy types, here’s why you should cut half of them off, here is a thought-terminating fantasy, wearable off the rack, about the best self-diagnosis for making other people see you as you want to be seen.
Malcolm wrote in Journalist about the difficulty McGinniss had with MacDonald, and that she, in turn, had with McGinniss, of discovering one’s subject is not one of those rare self-novelizing “naturals” who does “a lot of the writer’s work for him through their own special self-invention.” But Malcolm still found many of these talents among the institutions of her time. It is difficult to imagine her books coming out today, in part because so many of their would-be characters are not so much making novels of themselves as memes. What is actually startling about the present state of our institutions is the degree to which our utter lack of faith in any of them has in no way imperiled their profitability or influence. Instead, they have begun offering the cynicism of the enterprise as the very premise of their product. Today, “antipsychiatric” therapists; “outsider,” “populist” politicians; and “independent” journalists and pundits outnumber, in votes and streams and gross quarterly profits, those earnest practitioners still manning the crumbling walls of the mainstream. These new interpreters of reality might make for poor subjects in the reportage of some new Malcolm, but they still earn.
I do not think this would have taken the original Janet Malcolm by surprise. The great insight of her work, what she called the great insight of Freud himself, was not only that we were trapped within our fantasies of one another, but that we do not want to escape them. Most people cannot stand psychoanalysis: They are enraged by its demands and doubly enraged when it feels as if it might be working. Malcolm tells us that “patients in analysis sometimes say they feel they are being driven crazy by the treatment,” but it is the very clarity of their “glimpse into the abyss of unmediated individuality and idiosyncrasy that is the Freudian unconscious which causes them to feel this way.” To see past our illusions, to set aside transference and see ourselves and one another as we really are, is to provoke a kind of primal fury. To give such vision to others, even for a moment, is to invite their hatred and aggression. “The unexamined life might not be worth living but the examined life is impossible to live for more than a few moments at a time,” Malcolm wrote in Freud Archives.
By Journalist, the main development in Malcolm’s thought is that we are not so ignorant of our self-deceptions as we are inevitable, willing collaborators. The trouble is not just that we cannot escape the delusions of transference and the betrayals it ordains but that we do not want to, because the alternative, unvarnished reality, is unprofitable and unbearable. “The crowning paradox of psychoanalysis is the near-uselessness of its insights,” Malcolm wrote. What she meant is that if there seemed to be something Socratic about her character before, this is where she breaks with the old master: the good man — the wise man, the man who truly sees himself and others — is only ever harmed in life and in death.
What could be the result, then, but a postmodernity in which institutions and their attendant discursive fantasies retain all of their power but none of their potency? Like the rash of contemporary Catholic converts who become sedevacantists at the very moment of their first communion, the new psychiatrist, the new politician, and the new journalist freely admit the fraudulence of their professions in the same breath that they ask you to accept their credentials. The revelation of once-sacrosanct social realities as mere fantasies did not generate an alternative to those fantasies as the basis for intelligible human life. We may be more cynical than we were in Malcolm’s prime, but we are no less credulous or dependent. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic. The end of faith does not mean the end of the relations themselves. It only makes them more cynical, more glibly comforting, and empty. That is the destruction Malcolm meant. What is left to do? You have to take the poison to throw it up, and feeling sick is preferable to feeling nothing.
Here, then, is the tragedy: Malcolm took psychoanalysis as her first and central subject because she believed, despite her skepticism, in its unnerving possibility. “The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter,” she wrote, but the journalist, like most purveyors of fantasy, is all too happy to be led by his own countertransference, to exploit mutual misapprehension in the production of his preferred story. Only psychoanalysis ever tried, despite its failings, despite its pretensions, despite its often-preposterous specifics, to create the conditions in which people could see the truth. “Insight isn’t superficial,” Green tells Malcolm, “it isn’t simply learning something mildly interesting about yourself. It is becoming yourself.” It changes you — or would, if we could manage it. Today, even psychology has given up the hunt. But what Malcolm glimpsed from time to time, in the best essays of Freud, in the most successful analytic sessions, even in the most penetrating acts of literary writing, the possibility that haunts her corpus and has all but vanished over the horizon of the present, is that the capacity to see ourselves and one another plainly is still locked somewhere inside our minds but that this wisdom, once within our reach, remains beyond our grasp. It is destined for some other time, for some other country, for some other species capable of seeing what we cannot.
Emmett Rensin is the author of The Complications: On Going Insane in America.