Impossible Professions: Freud and Janet Malcolm (ft. Patrick Blanchfield & Abby Kluchin)

Know Your Enemy presents: an episode of Ordinary Unhappiness — a new podcast about psychoanalysis with hosts Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield. 

Their guest? Sam Adler-Bell! In the episode that follows, we talk about how Sam came to study conservative thought from a leftist perspective and what role psychoanalysis plays in that project; discuss the libidinal satisfactions of conservative politics; and speculate about the contemporary absence of sophisticated right-wing psychoanalytic thinkers. Then they turn to a favorite writer, journalist Janet Malcolm, author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and The Journalist and the Murderer. They talk about parallels between the role of the analyst and that of the journalist; interiors and interiority; secrets, thefts, and betrayals; the so-called “Freud wars”; and the internal politics of psychoanalytic institutions. Finally, they examine Malcolm’s famous claim that the task of the journalist is “morally indefensible” and its implications for the work of the analyst. 

Further reading: 

Sam Adler-Bell, "Janet Malcolm’s Dangerous Method," The New Republic, Mar 20, 2023

Sam Adler-Bell, "Succession's Repetition Compulsion," The Nation,  Nov 10, 2021

Hannah Gold, “Analysis Interminable: On Janet Malcolm,” The Nation, June 25, 2021.

Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession  (1982)

— In The Freud Archives  (1984)

— The Journalist and the Murderer  (1990)

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