SOURCE: Erens, Pamela. “Flirting with the Past.” New England Review 15, no. 3 (summer 1993): 212-19.

In the following review, Erens appraises the essays in The Purloined Clinic, noting that Malcolm urges readers to uncover truths by exposing falsehoods.

Janet Malcolm has a rare talent: She is able to write about psychoanalysis in language that cats and dogs can read, without distorting or diluting its complexity, its mystery or its pleasures. The books she published in the early 1980s, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and In the Freud Archives, both of which first appeared as articles in The New Yorker, plucked psychoanalytic thought from the pages of professional journals and collections of literary theory and returned it to public discourse, reforging its connections with the ordinary stuff of life: desire, memory, morality, mortality.

To Malcolm, psychoanalysis is not simply a body of knowledge or a clinical method. She prefers to use the...