Daisy Miller (1879) by Henry James, In the Freud Archives (1983) by Janet Malcolm
I love Janet Malcolm's writing. It's clear and beautiful, like early Joan Didion, before Didion got all sour. On the same day I read Daisy Miller and then ITFA. From ITFA: "There are a few among us -- psychoanalysts have encountered them -- who are blessed or cursed with a strange imperviousness to the unpleasantness of self-knowledge." Daisy Miller was one of them.
Malcolm herself invokes James's The Aspern Papers -- her story is a real-life Aspern Papers.
In the Freud Archives is an intellectual romp. (The story in brief -- Jeffrey Masson contended that Freud changed his view of his patients' experiences of sexual abuse as children from memories to fantasies for self-serving reasons. The Freudian establishment of the time closed ranks against him.) I remember reading the story when it was published in the New Yorker in the 80's and being fascinated by Peter Swales, the self-taught Freud historian. Today, he would have a blog and email -- in the 70's and 80's, he did it all with Xeroxing and letters. The issues he and Masson and others were arguing over were serious issues. But Masson was naive to think his book (The Assault on Truth, 1984) would doom psychoanalysis. Freud had great insights into our inner lives. Our unconscious and fantasy lives are important. But child abuse really does exist. Sadly, it abounds. Reality does matter, but so does its effects on us. That abuse (real, not imagined) leads to later problems is now a psychological truism.
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4 comments:
I've just read ITFA and am just as fascinated as you are by the character of Peter Swales. I've been trying to find out what he's been doing in the past twenty years, but can find out very little. At one point, he had, I believe, 4 book contracts, but none of them seem to have been published.
If you have any info on what he's doing these days, my curiosity would thank you.
Thanks for commenting. I have no idea what Swales is up to these days.
He's alive and well and living in Turkey. Google him and you'll find lots of snippets or what he's been doing over the last 20 years.
I enjoyed ITFA as well, but I think Malcolm exaggerated a bit in her portraits of Swales, Eissler, and Masson. She made fun of Eissler in the book, but the obituary she later wrote about him was worshipful.
I encountered Swales's name again in Newsweek, after he figured out the true identity of "Sybil," on whom the book on multiple personality was supposedly based.
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