In The Freud Archives | Granta

  • Published: 01/12/2011
  • ISBN: 9781847085634
  • Granta Books
  • 192 pages

In The Freud Archives

Janet Malcolm

Who will inherit the secrets of Sigmund Freud? Who will protect his reputation? Who may destroy it? Janet Malcolm’s investigation into the personalities who clash over Freud’s legacy has become a celebrated story of seduction and betrayal, love and hatred, fantasy and reality. It is both a comedy and a tragedy. Malcolm’s cast of characters includes K. R. Eissler, a venerable psychoanalyst and keeper of the Freud flame; Jeffrey Mason, a flamboyant Sanskrit scholar and virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a former assistant to the Rolling Stones and indefatigable researcher. Each of them thinks they know the truth about Freud, and each needs the help of the other. Malcolm endeavours to untangle the causes of their rivalry and soured friendships, while the flaws and mysteries of Freud’s early work tower in the background.

A superbly skilled portrait of a bizarre, cloistered world and the obsessed men who guard it or try to break it open. From beginning to end it has the coolly accomplished excitement of a thriller

Sunday Times

One of the most consistent non-fiction writers of our time. Certainly, she is one of the most brilliant... The effect of this book, Malcolm's masterpiece, is electrifying

Spectator

In this brilliant and enjoyable book, a major crisis within one of the most important systems of ideas of our century is presented in the style of a movie vehicle for Jack Nicholson

Times Literary Supplement

The Author

Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) is widely considered to be one of America’s most notable literary journalists. She was born in Prague and was educated at the University of Michigan. She was a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of several critically acclaimed books, including In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes all published by Granta. She won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award in Biography for Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale University Press) in 2008. Her final book Still Pictures is forthcoming in 2023.

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From the Same Author

Janet Malcolm on Granta.com

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Skromnost

Janet Malcolm

‘The Czech word skromnost means “modesty”, but it also carries a mild sense of forelock-tugging humbleness, of knowing one’s place.’

An excerpt from Janet Malcolm’s final book.

Art & Photography | Granta 126

The Emily Dickinson Series

Janet Malcolm

The Emily Dickinson Series is a collection of collages by Janet Malcolm that appear in Granta 126: do you remember.