Patrick Redford: Oftentimes we at DRAB read books that require us to project ourselves out into some unfamiliar scenario and read about something we have zero familiarity with. So I'm happy that Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives has finally furnished this book club with something on which I can speak with great authority: Chez Panisse, the best restaurant in Berkeley and absolutely the place you would take someone like Malcolm if you were trying to convey your Seriousness.
Brandy Jensen: Whenever I read this kind of reported essay or magazine piece from the good old days of media, I am overcome with envy. They always go to incredible restaurants, they are always offering to fly to Vienna for an interview. That type of glamor is really what we deserve.
Maitreyi Anantharaman: Except for the reporting budgets, In the Freud Archives certainly feels familiar. It's the kind of weird niche beef we read about in The Cut (ah, Amy Chua is throwing sketchy parties at Yale Law School … time for me to spend an hour learning about this!) or eat up in a Normal Gossip episode. It's fun to be in our position as readers, shuffled between the living rooms and dining rooms of bonkers people. And they're colorful enough to make us immediately care.
BJ: The extent to which basically everyone who appears in this book could be described as "a real character" is truly remarkable. That they are also, pretty much uniformly, tasked with helping other people live less miserably makes the whole thing read like a comedy at times. Would you trust any of the analysts in this book to help you reach ordinary unhappiness?
PR: Absolutely not, though I think I could learn where the guardrails of crankery were by considering the various self-destructions. A thought I am mildly ashamed of having had was that if these guys were all born 35 years later, they would each be insufferable online posters in distinct ways. Peter Swales would be a grindset guy, Kurt Eissler would be constantly falling into Adrian Chiles–esque whoopsies, etc.
On the subject of analysis as such, something that Malcolm writes early in the book that I kept as a sort of frame throughout was this concept of the fundamental impossibility of living a fully analyzed life at all times. "The most dedicated Freudians do daily battle with the disinclination of the mind to accept the chastening evidence of the fossils of the unconscious," she writes. "To fully accept the idea of unconscious motivation is to cease to be human." This seems right and helped me think of the struggles each of the three protagonists had as essentially unavoidable.
BJ: That they are all swinging wildly between worship and rejection (of each other, of Freud, of themselves) definitely added a lot of narrative propulsion. Malcolm's abilities as a writer also make this both a rich and really fun read. That she can occupy the position, essentially, of analyst while her subjects talk themselves into impossible and ludicrous positions is one of a few ways that journalistic endeavors and psychoanalytic ones become the same thing in a lot of her work. Both the journalist and the analysts are after something we can never have: a kind of truthful accounting of the unknown.
MA: For all the kookiness of the analysts, she does really love their world, right?
BJ: Oh absolutely! It's funny but you get the sense she actually has the fullest understanding of Freud of anyone in the book. Unlike her subjects, who either overestimate his infallibility and perfection or seek to kill their father.
PR: Yeah Maitreyi, she definitely does. Malcolm is almost writing in the negative, having these three guys explain themselves and their fuckups ad nauseam until you can see all the cracks in their arguments, into which she pours herself. She's doing analysis analysis, more or less, a style I found totally compelling.
BJ: She's often described as a "withering" writer, but the book is never outright contemptuous or mean. She has real admiration even for work she thinks is wrong, like that one Swales paper she praises for its sweeping argumentation and powerful logic, before going on to say that of course it's total bullshit. I also love how, like an analyst, she lets you come to certain things yourself as a reader. Like halfway through I realized that the Freud papers themselves—locked away and inaccessible, critical to the development of the field, responsible for the actions of everyone in the book—are a text in the same way the unconscious is a text, and I was so proud of myself for that insight, but of course everything she had been writing led me exactly there lol.
MA: Malcolm is probably most famous for her writing on journalism itself, namely on its hypocrisies. So I was interested in where this story left her. Jeff Masson sued Malcolm for libel after she published her New Yorker story about him, and suddenly, she was in the strange position of being a subject. She writes a little about the lawsuit in an afterword to The Journalist and the Murderer: "People who have never sued anyone or been sued have missed a narcissistic pleasure that is not quite like any other."
And then not long before she died, she revisited that afterword in this New York Review of Books essay about the trial. Turns out the New Yorker writer mode ("reticent, self-deprecating, and, maybe, here and there, funny") doesn't work well before a jury. Instead she has to take up the art of persuasion. That she sees it as something distinct from her work as a journalist is pretty telling, I think. She also included this kind of shocking bit about "a literary device" she used in the book: "the uninterrupted monologue in which characters made preposterously long speeches in impossibly good English. Anyone could see that the speech had never taken place as such but was a compilation of what the character had said to the reporter over a period of time. Not everyone liked the convention, but no one thought it was deceptive, since its artificiality was so blatant." I'm a pretty wised-up media consumer, and the artificiality was not that blatant. Chez Panisse is a house of lies!
PR: Janet, how could you? I thought au gratin dauphinoise meant something. I had no idea she was filling in the blanks that way, and though a jury might not be sympathetic to the idea of "thematic truths vs. literal truths," I certainly am. Also how could having a few lies in there not make a book about Sigmund damn Freud better?
BJ: My hottest journalism take is that if you can write like Janet Malcolm, you should be allowed to make some stuff up.
MA: The jury agreed!
PR: Have either of you read much Freud? I have not, and my faintly heretical sense was that writing about his writing is far more interesting than the actual stuff itself. At least his blogs in the archives anyway, which seemed to concern Freud The Person rather than Freud The Thinker. The most interested I've ever been in the guy himself was when I learned he spent a few years trying and failing to answer the eel question.
BJ: I did in grad school, and then again more recently as a bunch of my friends have become quite Freud-pilled. Patrick, you're right in that the appeal for me is less in the case studies and more in something like his essay "The Uncanny." (A great read!)
What's interesting is that in some ways Malcolm functions to a number of writers I know in the same way Freud functions to the analysts in this book: the person you constantly return to for knowledge and inspiration. She is someone you might describe as "your favorite writer's favorite writer" and reading this book, it's clear why. She is so deft, and present without being intrusive, and wry, and incisive. All of the qualities one might want in a person to whom you confess your secrets, although obviously Masson would disagree.
MA: Malcolm didn't seem to hold Masson in high regard, though I did feel kind of bad for him at book's end, when he's groping around for something new to study now that he doesn't have the archives to trawl. I would not have guessed what he did eventually do, which was become a vegan activist.
BJ: I did not know that and it is delightful to me, thank you. I wonder if he stayed with the girlfriend who was very California.
PR: I'm shocked he didn't get bored of that and pivot into, like, architecture or something else totally unrelated. It's sort of hard not to read this as Malcolm taking some license here, but what was most striking about Masson was how his flaws as a thinker and writer were also reflected in the way he misread Freud. He is someone who does one thing well, very quickly, then gets bored and disillusioned, so of course he'd decide seduction theory was fake and find an elephant to save. Ditto for Eissler (too reverential of Freud as this god-king figure, to the extent that he couldn't brook any disagreement) and Swales (who is fundamentally a magician, crafting beautiful, showy arguments with no real truth at their base). I shudder to think how she'd portray me had she ever found herself unlucky enough to do a story about Defector.
BJ: I felt real sympathy for Eissler, though, as I think Malcolm did too. Constantly taken in by these charismatic guys who, unlike everyone else in the profession, are not too scared to talk to him like a friend. But then of course you get someone telling Malcolm that Eissler just "isn't good with people" and once again think: That's the whole job! You are supposed to understand people! I think the true hero of this book is the unfailing work of the United States Postal Service, constantly delivering overwrought letters between everyone involved.
MA: I wish anyone cared enough about my work to send me a 45-page takedown.
