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Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession is an expanded version of her article originally appearing in the New Yorker. It is an easy to read, gracefully written work, which cannot be accused of gross oversimplification so common to psychoanalytic materials meant for general audiences. Within its pages one will find rather good summaries of key Freudian ideas, clinical concepts, basic training issues, and some of the ubiquitous personal strains involved in analytic practice. Specifically, the descriptions of the differences between Freud and Klein, Kernberg and Kohut, Stone and Brenner are surprisingly on the mark. The discussion of the power struggles that take place in analytic organizations is quite accurate.
The author's conclusions are based on rather extensive interviewing of Aaron Green (a pseudonym) and other analysts. The amount of data collected is impressive as is Malcolm's capacity to draw, in the main, legitimate inferences from these. In order to avoid confusing bypaths, she deliberately restricted her sample to the medical Freudian psychoanalytic establishment of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Whereas it is perhaps true that this makes the story easier to tell, what is lost is an overview of the profession as a whole. The “impossible profession” includes a substantial nonmedical wing as well as a medical one. There are important similarities and differences between the two wings, which unfortunately receive scant attention in these pages. In the interest of greater comprehensiveness