SOURCE: Storr, Anthony. “Portrait of a Therapist.” New Republic 185, no. 11 (16 September 1981): 34-6.

In the following review of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Storr evaluates Malcolm's views on traditional, dispassionate psychoanalysis, contrasting such methods to sympathetic and interactive analytical approaches.

This short book [Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession] is based on a series of essays on psychoanalysis which attracted attention when they appeared in the New Yorker. As the bibliography attests, Janet Malcolm has done her homework. In addition, she recorded a number of interviews with practicing psychoanalysts, of whom “Aaron Green” is her principal informant. Aaron Green is a Freudian analyst of the fundamentalist variety. He has had two analyses himself: the first, lasting six years, when he was a medical student; the second, lasting nine years, when he was an aspirant psychoanalyst in training. He calls psychoanalysis a science. He believes that Freud made certain fundamental discoveries concerning infantile...