Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm

As part of my DPhil, I did quite a lot of research into Freud and his disciples. I sat and read the Journal of Psychoanalysis from the 1920s, and wrote about how the language of Freudianism helped inspire the language of the fantastic (and vice versa). It was fascinating, and I was able to use some of this research in the forthcoming afterword to the British Library’s reprint of Rose Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages. But I signed out of psychoanalysis in about 1935, and know very little about what followed.

That’s where Janet Malcolm comes in. I became besotted with her after reading Two Lives, the book she wrote about Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, and have been steadily reading her others since. I’ve previously read In the Freud Archives, which did include a lot of modern Freudians and their in-fighting, but Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession looks more closely and what psychoanalysis means today – or at least the ‘today’ of 1981, when the book was published. The title comes from a quote by Freud: ”It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.’

When Freud was about, psychoanalysis was usually seen as a short-term treatment to cure extreme symptoms – people went for a few weeks or months. By the time Malcolm explored the profession, it was anticipated that treatment would last many years – of going every day to spend an ‘analysis hour’ (50 minutes) with the analyst. Indeed, as Malcolm explains:

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. Even the most experienced and successful analysts acknowledge at least as many cases that run afoul or end prematurely or inconclusively as those that properly terminate.

Much of the book is based upon interviews Malcolm does with ‘Aaron Green’ (a pseudonym), a 46-year-old analyst whom Malcolm describes on the first page as ‘a slight man, with a vivid, impatient, unsmiling face’. That description is quintessentially Malcolm and shows her unabashed style as a journalist/writer – she writes as though her subjects will never read what is written; as though she can be as blunt on the page as she is in her head. But never with a sense of righting a wrong, or finding personal enjoyment in describing the people she interviews. It’s just a summing up.

I loved all the sections where she relays her interviews with Green – whether establishing his dissatisfaction with his career or looking at the wider scope of psychoanalysis and the arguments and factions that exist within it. Malcolm is brilliant at interviews that reveal the whole of the person often, you imagine, slightly against their better judgement. She is something of an analyst herself in these sections and is brilliant at getting under the skin of a close-knit, often warring fraternity.

The things that analysts warred over in this period are relatively niche. Should an analyst offer sympathy to a grieving patient? Is it ever acceptable for a patient and an analyst to date after their professional relationship has ended? It’s intriguing that all the big Freudian ideas – the Oedipus complex, sublimation, the death drive etc. – are not disputed internally. They are no longer the big headline-grabbing discoveries. Analysts are left to dispute the lesser corners of their profession – even while it remains a collection of absurdities to a large percentage of the world.

Where I found Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession less successful was, ironically, where it did what it purported to do. The book sort of claims to be an introduction to psychoanalysis, and I suppose that’s the way it would be marketed – but I found it quite dry when Malcolm was tracing the history of the profession and its various key areas. Whenever she removed herself from the narrative, basically. She is one of those rare writers that you want to intrude into her topic more, rather than less.

And it seems that, much like when I read Two Lives to find out about Gertrude Stein and ended up more interested in Janet Malcolm, I am always going to read her books wanting to spend more time when her intriguing personality – her way of reporting and interviewing, and her unique take on writing and the world.