The Purloined Clinic Selected Writings

by MALCOLM, JANET

• ISBN13: 9780679748106
• ISBN10: 0679748105
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-11-02
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

The Purloined Clinic is a retrospective of essays, reviews, and reports that reflect the range and depth of Janet Malcolm's engagement with psychology, criticism, art, and literature. She examines aspects of "that absurdist collaboration," the psychoanalytic dialogue, from which come "small, stray sell recognitions that no other human relationship yields, brought forward under conditions...that no other human relationship could survive." She addresses such subjects as Tom Wolfe's vendetta against modern architecture, Milan Kundera's literary experiments, and Vaclav Havel's prison letters. She explores the somewhat deflated world of post-revolutionary Prague, guides us through the labyrinthine New York art world of the eighties, and takes us behind the one-way mirror of Salvador Minuchin's school of family therapy.And to each subject she brings the incisive skepticism and dazzling epigrammatic style that are her hallmarks. "Why don't more people write like [Malcolm]?... She is cast from the mold of the Eastern European intellectual: beholden to modernism. as familiar with Kundera's exile as she is with Freud's Vienna. This sensibility must grant her the detachment she sometimes so mercilessly employs, but it also gives her an unassailable passion for getting to the center of things." Boston Globe

Author Biography

Janet Malcolm is an author and a journalist at The New Yorker. Her books include Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey, The Crime of Sheila McGough, and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Born in Prague, she grew up in New York and lives there now with her husband, Gardner Botsford.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Part I
Dora	3	(28)
Six Roses ou Cirrbose?	31	(17)
The Patient Is Always Right	48	(15)
The Seven-Minute Hour	63	(10)
Part II
The Quarterly Affair	73	(19)
What Maisie Didn't Know	92	(11)
School of the Blind	103	(9)
A Problem of Growth	112	(7)
Schneebaum's Confessions	119	(8)
Wolfe in Wolfe's Clothing	127	(11)
The Purloined Clinic	138	(11)
Kundera's Legerdemain	149	(12)
The Trial of Alyosha	161	(16)
Part III
The One-Way Mirror	177	(53)
A Girl of the Zeitgeist	230	(84)
The Window Washer	314