Word: psychoanalyst
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...famous libel case--psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson against the New Yorker's Janet Malcolm--turned in part on whether an interview took place over goat cheese at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., or breakfast at Malcolm's Manhattan home. Details matter, especially when they wound real people. Reich is safe: his meals--lunch, breakfast, whatever--were with public figures. Not so the reader who thought Reich was being true to what happened...
Even the most casual readers of Philip Roth's fabulously inventive novels, those slyly tangled weavings of fiction and autobiography, can get some sense that the author might not make an ideal mate. An unforgettable lover, perhaps; a witty dinner companion, absolutely. But Roth, as Alexander Portnoy's psychoanalyst might put it, clearly has some "issues" about women...
...purely psychological conditions--among them schizophrenia, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and ocd--turn out to be caused by specific chemical imbalances. Those who suffer from them are racked not by toilet-training traumas or the "unceasing terror and tension of the fetal night" (as an early psychoanalyst put it) but by something as simple--and complex--as an imperfectly mixed chemical cocktail. The Oedipus complex has been reduced to a matter of molecules...
...this type of regression contains one immense surprise: the resulting child-adult turns out to be not the radiant and innocent child Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined but rather a hard, half-blind, furiously offended, rancorous, enraged infant capable of any atrocity. As the late Austrian child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein noted, the thwarted infant feels a desire to tear up everything, wipe out both parents...
...dopey campiness that Homes is incapable of. She takes her crazed protagonist very seriously, describing his every abhorrent desire in mind-boggling detail that amounts to a twisted, writerly artfulness all its own. And as in her last book, In a Country of Mothers, the story of a psychoanalyst's debilitating obsession with a young patient, Homes shows a knack for intertwining two characters' pathologies. In Alice she has created a compelling ally for the pedophile, a 19-year old girl with a lust for prepubescent boys who sends him letters in prison recounting her seductions. The girl wants...