Janet Clara Malcolm (born Jana Klara Wienerová; July 8, 1934 – June 16, 2021) was an American writer, staff journalist at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist who fled antisemitic persecution in Nazi-occupied Prague. She was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984), and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). Malcolm wrote frequently about psychoanalysis and explored the relationship between journalist and subject. She was known for her prose style and for polarizing criticism of her profession, especially in her most contentious work, The Journalist and the Murderer, which has become a staple of journalism-school curricula.

Early life

Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, one of two daughters (the other is the author Marie Winn), of Hanna () and Josef Wiener (aka Joseph A. Winn), a psychiatrist. She resided in New York City after her Jewish family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939, fleeing Nazi persecution of Jews. Malcolm was educated at the High School of Music and Art, and then at the University of Michigan, writing about holiday shopping and children's books, as well as a column on home decor. and poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), one on Anton Chekhov, and another on the true crime genre. In a number of works, she returned repeatedly to the subject of psychoanalysis. Her papers are held at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, which acquired her archive in 2013.

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

In 1981, Malcolm published a book on the modern psychoanalytic profession, following a psychoanalyst she gave the pseudonym “Aaron Green”. Freud scholar Peter Gay wrote that Malcolm's "witty and wicked Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession has been praised by psychoanalysts (with justice) as a dependable introduction to analytic theory and technique. It has the rare advantage over more solemn texts of being funny as well as informative".

In his 1981 New York Times review, Joseph Edelson wrote that Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession "is an artful book", praising Malcolm’s "keen eye for the surfaces — clothing, speech and furniture — that express character and social role" (noting she was then the photography critic for The New Yorker). It succeeds because she has instructed herself so carefully in the technical literature. Above all, it succeeds because she has been able to engage Aaron Green in a simulacrum of the psychoanalytic encounter — he confessing to her, she (I suspect) to him, the two of them joined in an intricate minuet of revelation."

The book was a 1982 National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist.

In the Freud Archives and the Masson case

Articles Malcolm published in The New Yorker and in her subsequent book In The Freud Archives (1984) offered, according to the book's dust jacket, "the narrative of an unlikely, tragic/comic encounter among three men." They were psychoanalyst Kurt R. Eissler, psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and independent Freud scholar Peter J. Swales. The book triggered a legal challenge by Masson, the former project director for the Sigmund Freud Archives.

In August 1989, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco agreed with a lower court in dismissing without full trial a libel lawsuit that Masson had filed against Malcolm, The New Yorker and Alfred A. Knopf.

Malcolm claimed that Masson had called himself an "intellectual gigolo". She also claimed that he said he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women, and fun" and claimed that he was, "after Freud, the greatest analyst that ever lived." Malcolm was unable to produce all the disputed material on tape.

After a decade of proceedings, a jury finally decided in Malcolm's favor on November 2, 1994.

In August 1995, Malcolm said that she had discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotes, swearing "an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine."

The Journalist and the Murderer

Malcolm's 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer begins with the thesis: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

Her example was the popular nonfiction writer Joe McGinniss. While researching his true crime book Fatal Vision, McGinniss lived with the defense team of doctor Jeffrey MacDonald while MacDonald was on trial for the murders of his two daughters and pregnant wife. In Malcolm’s reporting, McGinniss quickly arrived at the conclusion that MacDonald was guilty, but feigned belief in his innocence to gain MacDonald’s trust and access to the story—ultimately being sued by MacDonald over the deception. Roundly criticized upon first publication, the book is still controversial, although it has come to be regarded as a classic, routinely assigned to journalism students. Douglas McCollum wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, "In the decade after Malcolm's essay appeared, her once controversial theory became received wisdom."

Reception

Malcolm's penchant for controversial subjects and tendency to insert her views into the narrative brought her both admirers and critics. "Leaning heavily on the techniques of psychoanalysis, she probes not only actions and reactions but motivations and intent; she pursues literary analysis like a crime drama and courtroom battles like novels," wrote Cara Parks in The New Republic in April 2013. Parks praised Malcolm's "intensely intellectual style" as well as her "sharpness and creativity."

In Esquire magazine, Tom Junod characterized Malcolm as "a self-hater whose work has managed to speak for the self-hatred (not to mention the class issues) of a profession that has designs on being 'one of the professions' but never will be." Junod found her to be devoid of "journalistic sympathy" and observed: "Very few journalists are more animated by malice than Janet Malcolm.” Junod himself, however, has been criticized for a number of journalistic duplicities, including a smirking piece in Esquire which outed the actor Kevin Spacey, as well as a similarly homophobic faux profile of the singer Michael Stipe.

Katie Roiphe summarized the tension between these polarized views, writing in 2011: "Malcolm's work, then, occupies that strange glittering territory between controversy and the establishment: she is both a grande dame of journalism, and still, somehow, its enfant terrible." at the University of Michigan. After graduation, they moved to Washington, D.C., where Malcolm occasionally reviewed books for The New Republic before returning to New York. and served as a theater critic. Botsford died at the age of 87 in September 2004.

Death

On June 16, 2021, Janet Malcolm died of lung cancer at the age of 86 at a Manhattan hospital.

Works

Long-form non-fiction

  • Reissued in 2002 with an afterword by Janet Malcolm by New York Review Books.

Essay collections

Photography

As editor

  • Chekhov, Anton (2018). The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories. Translated by Constance Garnett; selected, with a preface by Janet Malcolm. riverrun.
  • — (2020). The Duel and other stories. Translated by Constance Garnett; selected, with a preface by Janet Malcolm. riverrun.
  • — (2020). Ward No. 6 and other stories. Translated by Constance Garnett; selected, with a preface by Janet Malcolm. riverrun.

Awards and honors

  • 1982 - National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist for Psychoanlysis: The Impossible Profession
  • 2013 - National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism) shortlist for Forty-One False Starts
  • 2017 - American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism

References

Further reading

  • Malcolm archive from The New Yorker
  • Malcolm archive from The New York Review of Books
  • Janet Malcom Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.