SOURCE: Brophy, Brigid. “Transference.” London Review of Books 4, no. 7 (15 April 1982): 3, 5.

In the following excerpt, Brophy occasionally questions Malcolm's beliefs and interpretations of psychoanalysis, but on the whole, states that Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession is thought-provoking, well written, and enjoyable to read.

The phenomenon of transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud's most original and radical discovery. The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each...