| The staff writer Alexandra Schwartz revisits Janet Malcolm’s illuminating 1980 report. This past week, The New Yorker published a digital issue devoted entirely to the theme of therapy—a first, but hardly the first time that the magazine has covered the subject. To mark the occasion, we’re bringing you a number of classic pieces about psychoanalysis. A good starting point for anyone seeking to understand that notoriously opaque and contentious art is “The Impossible Profession,” Janet Malcolm’s two-part examination of Freud and his descendants, originally published in 1980. Psychoanalysis, Malcolm writes, “has detonated throughout the intellectual, social, artistic, and ordinary life of our century as no cultural force has (it may not be off the mark to say) since Christianity.” To understand why, she traces the evolution of Freud’s therapeutic ideas and methods, from hypnosis to free association and dream analysis, and the evolution of Freud himself, from young, confident therapist to old master humbled by the dazzling complexity of human consciousness. Reading an early Freud lecture followed by his late work “is like comparing a Beethoven bagatelle with a late quartet,” Malcolm writes; what began in sunny certitude ended in “dark, dense” profundity. Things only got more tangled as subsequent generations of analysts squabbled over the master’s legacy. Malcolm introduces us to one such analyst, Aaron Green, a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, who is himself revealed to be a bundle of neuroses. Green’s unburdening of himself to Malcolm recalls a patient’s behavior on the couch, and for good reason. We journalists often find that our own art can resemble analysis. We ask another person to open her life to us and do our best to make connections—but we promise no cures. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment