Word: malcolm
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...Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession is a timely and masterful foray into the practice and penetralia of this modern mystery religion. Timely because since the golden age of piety of the fifties--when Salinger's Seymour Glass frolicked blithely with bananafish while his new bride chatted with her mother about what all the "goddam" analysts thought about that peculiar young man--psychoanalysis has been receding from, the public eye. After these years of gestalt therapy, est, and, yes, hot tubs (who can really believe that a neighborhood of fools sitting in a tub of scalding water is therapy...
...Malcolm takes as her task the shrinking of the big picture into the small book. Devoting long sections to expositions of orthodox Freudian thought and occasionally to the ideas of some of the myriad of dissenters, the author provides a lucid introduction to such often misunderstood concepts as the Oedipal complex, penis envy, and the tripartite scheme of the mind. Her delvings are in themselves persuasive arguments. Along with some of the history of the psychoanalytic movement--she assiduously avoids Adler and Jung--the author provides a rather scorching insight into the analytic establishment. The image of these beacons...
...THEY ARE, comes the answer from analyst "Aaron Green", the central figure in The Impossible Profession. And, as Green reveals in his discussions with Malcolm, the way to get at the neuroses is through the cultivation of a transference with the analyst. Here begins the great mirror game that is analysis...
...define others, the way we seem them according to "early blueprints" from out first six years. Only in rare moments do we ever see each other as we are. The rest of the time, we perceive only the shadows cast by psychic scars unknown at the conscious level. Malcolm writes...
Transference lies at the heart of The Impossible Profession; its endless variations constitute the theme of the book's analysis--the analysis of Aaron Green by Malcolm. How does the analyst abnegate his personality in the analytic relationship to allow the patient to project onto him the deepest levels and thereby gain small measure of catharsis? How does the analyst gesture obliquely at what he sees at the root of the patient's suffering? What can the patient benefit from all this mental tinkering? And finally, how does the analyst handle his own "counter transference", his impression of the patient...