The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings

by Janet Malcolm

The Purloined Clinic is a retrospective of essays, reviews, and reports that reflect the range and depth of Janet Malcolm's engagement with psychology, criticism, art, and literature.

She examines aspects of "that absurdist collaboration," the psychoanalytic dialogue, from which come "small, stray sell recognitions that no other human relationship yields, brought forward under conditions . . . that no other human relationship could survive." She addresses such subjects as Tom Wolfe's vendetta against modern architecture, Milan Kundera's literary experiments, and Vaclav Havel's prison letters. She explores the somewhat deflated world of post-revolutionary Prague, guides us through the labyrinthine New York art world of the eighties, and takes us behind the one-way mirror of Salvador Minuchin's school of family therapy. And to each subject she brings the incisive skepticism and dazzling epigrammatic style that are her hallmarks.

“Why don’t more people write like [Malcolm]? . . . She is cast from the mold of the Eastern European beholden to modernism. as familiar with Kundera’s exile as she is with Freud’s Vienna. This sensibility must grant her the detachment she sometimes so mercilessly employs, but it also gives her an unassailable passion for getting to the center of things.” — Boston Globe

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis, Criticism, Psychology, Journalism, Literary Criticism

401 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Janet Malcolm was a journalist, biographer, collagist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of In the Freud Archives and The Crime of Sheila McGough , as well as biographies of Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, and Anton Chekhov.

The Modern Library chose her controversial book The Journalist and the Murderer — with its infamous first line — as one of the 100 best non-fiction works of the 20th century.

Her most recent book is Forty-one False Starts .

Reviews

[Trish]

I read a wonderful book of essays this week by Helen Garner, called Everywhere I Look. After each essay I would "just look at one more" until the entire book was read in a matter of hours. I'd had no intention of reading them one after another, but her language was so clear and so exact and so accessible. In one essay Helen Garner admitted she modeled her work on Janet Malcolm's, who I'd not read.

I immediately picked up this book and Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers. This book was the opposite of Garner's, not in a good way. It was dense, and much too erudite, filled with psychoanalysis and boring notes about people I've never read. Way out of my league. I don't care. Janet Malcolm had her moment. They don't educate people like her then-audience anymore. Nobody would understand it now.

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Janet Malcolm so much, my deepest literary aspiration is to ever display a wit even one-tenth as dry as hers. This collection is pretty great, although the long essay is clearly the form where she does her best work. The opening section is essays about psychoanalysis, the second part is reviews and writing on literature, and the third is some not-quite-long-enough-for-a-book essays (one on family therapy, one that is more fascinating than it has any right to be about Artforum magazine, and one about post-Velvet Revolution Prague). Should clearly have been a section about crime to round out the thematic best-of, but I don't know if she has any shorter pieces about murder.

[Hank Stuever · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think there's something pretty great in just about every piece she files, and certainly plenty to learn. It seems though, that unless the subject is relatively sexy, people find the reading to be dry as toast. Sometimes I like unbuttered toast.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Malcolm's usual deep thinking and thorough reporting, even if I wasn't all that engaged. It was me, not the essays.

[Matthew Aldridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part of the book comprises four essays on Freud and psychoanalysis, both subjects I have essentially zero interest in. These were very boring, and I would not have ground through them for any other writer. ★

The second part of the book is a bunch of book reviews. Only the piece on Edmund Gosse makes a very strong case to be worthy of reprinting in a book. The pieces on Bloomsbury and Milan Kundera are interesting, but Malcolm has since treated both subjects in more depth and more interestingly elsewhere ("A House of One's Own" in Forty-one False Starts and "The Window Washer" later in this volume). ★★

The third and longest part of the book comprises three long reported pieces. The first, on a family therapist, is interesting when it's straight reportage, but suffers from some of the same problems as the first part of the book. The second, "The Girl of the Zeitgeist", supposes to be a profile of Ingrid Sischy, then the editor of ArtForum, but expands into a profile of the New York art world of the mid-eighties. No piece of writing has ever had such delicious descriptions of apartments. This is the first great piece by my favourite writer. The last, "The Window Washer", is a report from Prague in 1990, just after the Velvet Revolution, a city that was also Malcolm's birthplace, and mostly concentrates on Malcolm's interactions with a rather minor ex-dissident. It's miraculously good, and I'm totally unable to explain why or how. ★★★★★

[Diana]

read it!

[Belgrave Book Club]

Suggested by Helen Garner.