The Purloined Clinic

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 GlobePreface

Part I

Dora
Six Roses ou Cirrhose?
The Patient Is Always Right
The Seven-Minute Hour

Part II

The Quarterly Affair
What Maisie Didn't Know
School of the Blind
A Problem of Growth
Schneebaum's Confession
Wolfe in Wolfe's Clothing
The Purloined Clinic
Kundera's Legerdemain
The Trial of Alyosha

Part III

The One-Way Mirror
A Girl of the Zeitgeist
The Window Washer"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 GlobeJanet 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.