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.
Join the conversation!
Please share your thoughts about this article below. We value your opinions, and would love to see you add to the discussion!