SOURCE: Wilmers, Mary-Kay. “Fortress Freud.” London Review of Books 7, no. 7 (18 April 1985): 10-11.

In the following review, Wilmers studies Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and In the Freud Archives, underscoring the exclusiveness and the separatist aspects of the psychoanalytical professional's lifestyle.

Psychoanalysts have a difficult relationship with the rest of the world—or, as they sometimes call it, ‘the goyim’. Janet Malcolm's two very striking books of reportage, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and In the Freud Archives, make this clear. Freud's wife, according to her grandson, ‘divided the world into those who knew of grandfather and those who did not’. The latter, he said, ‘did not play any role in her life’. In that sense every analyst is Freud's wife and lives in a world entirely taken up with psychoanalytic concerns. Sometimes it seems that they hardly know what may happen in real life and fear it accordingly. On...