Janet Malcolm is remembered for the clarity of her vision, and what she saw most acutely was our blindness.
“The phenomenon of transference — how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery,” she writes in the opening pages of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1980). “The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities — personal relations — is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.” Malcolm’s career began in 1963 at the New Yorker, where she covered shopping and children’s literature and wrote a column on home décor. It was not until 1978, after she quit smoking and discovered that she could not sit still without her cigarettes, that she began seriously reporting, producing a long piece on family therapy that would inaugurate her as one of those iconoclast literary reporters that the New Yorker used to reliably produce. By 2023, two years after her death, the critic Charles Finch felt that it was “safe to say that the two most important long-form journalists” of the American 20th century “were Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm.”
