Word: malcolm
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...Grand Prix Corporation could not come up with the prize money demanded by the International Federation of Auto Sport (known by the French acronym of FICA). "In 1970 the Formula One purse was $244,000. Last year we put up one million; this year they wanted 1.2 million," says Malcolm Currie, Executive Director of the Corporation. "If you can't afford something you obviously...
...uncongenial atmosphere. This is not a popular notion especially at a time when people fear being stuffy if they do not establish an immediate first-name relationship with their muggers. Says Aaron Green, the pseudonymous New York analyst whose good-natured fatalism forms the tough core of Malcolm's book: "No one likes to hurt people-to cause them pain, to stand silently by as they suffer . . . That's where the real wear and tear of analysis lies-in this chronic struggle to keep oneself from doing the things that decent people naturally and spontaneously...
...tragic view: humankind's animal instincts limit the realization of its ideals. Such a bleak belief is, of course, a wellspring of humor. Freud did not promise a rose garden, only that the aim of treatment was "transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness." Green informs and amuses Malcolm with seriocomic tales about the infantile needs of himself and other psychoanalysts: their sharp clothes, boring talk of summer real estate, erotic entanglements with patients and strivings for position and prestige. Green's own analysis, he confesses, revealed a strong ambition to be a beautiful woman...
...field that has frequently equated money with excrement, the subject of fees is provocative. Malcolm notes that Freud established the concept of paying by the hour and holding the patient financially responsible for missed sessions. "Nothing," he wrote, "brings home to one so strongly the significance of the psychogenic factor in the daily life of men, the frequency of malingering, and the nonexistence of chance as a few years' practice of psychoanalysis on the strict principle of leasing by the hour." Green tells of one patient so obsessed with his bill that the doctor did not get paid...
Self-deprecation is often a pre-emptive strike to steal a detractor's thunder. At times, the reader half hopes that Janet Malcolm will tell Green that he is too hard on himself, that he really is an intelligent, sympathetic man who is defending the faith in an age of pill popping and package deals. But she maintains an orthodox silence with rewarding results. Eventually Green's faults and peeves make his good qualities even more believable. Technically, he also serves as a vital navigational point in the author's explorations. She discusses a number of analytic...