Psychoanalysis

By Janet Malcolm

From the author of In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer comes an intensive look at the practice of psychoanalysis through interviews with “Aaron Green,” a Freudian analyst in New York City.  Malcolm is accessible and lucid in describing the history of psychoanalysis and its development in the United States. It provides rare insight into the contradictory world of psychoanalytic training and treatment and a foundation for our understanding of psychiatry and mental health. 

"Janet Malcom has managed somehow to peer into the reticent, reclusive world of psychoanalysis and to report to us, with remarkable fidelity, what she has seen. When I began reading I thought condescendingly, 'She will get the facts right, and everything else wrong.' She does get the facts right, but far more pressive, she has been able to capture and convey the claustral atmosphere of the profession. Her book is journalism become art."  —Joseph Andelson, The New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307797834

Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm (1934–2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives; The Journalist and the Murderer; Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; and Forty-One False Starts, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In 2017, Malcolm received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews for Psychoanalysis

[lukeasrodgers_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good, if a bit dated, overview of contemporary Freudian psychoanalytic practice in New York in the late 70s, early 80s. The book interweaves a history of the field, its state in New York in the 70s, and reflections on a series of interview with one Aaron Green, a pseudonymous NYC Freudian psychoanalyst.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a wonderful book. Malcolm begins with an introduction to her principal source, a psychoanalyst she calls Aaron Green, and quickly moves on to a general introduction to the science of psychoanalysis. This short history of the field is marvellously written, and designed to be memorable so that the author can rely on the terms she has introduced later. More people should write this way - by giving the reader a comprehensive grounding in the vernacular early on, the latter portions of the book can go deeper, penetrating the surface in a way that many other writers shy away from.