Janet Malcolm

Janet Clara Malcolm (born Jana Klara Wienerová; July 8, 1934 – June 16, 2021) was an American writer, staff journalist at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist who fled antisemitic persecution in Nazi-occupied Prague just before it became impossible to escape.

Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, one of two daughters (the other is the author Marie Winn), of Hanna (née Taussig) and Josef Wiener (aka Joseph A. Winn), a psychiatrist.

She resided in New York City after her Jewish family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939, fleeing Nazi persecution of Jews.

Malcolm was educated at the High School of Music and Art, and then at the University of Michigan, where she wrote for the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily, and the humor magazine, The Gargoyle, later editing The Gargoyle.

Malcolm was a literary nonfiction writer known for her prose style and her examination of the relationship between journalist and subject.

She began working at The New Yorker in 1963 with women's interest assignments, writing about holiday shopping and children's books, as well as a column on home decor.

She next wrote about photography for the magazine.

She moved to reporting in 1978, which Malcolm attributed to her smoking cessation in a 2011 profile by Katie Roiphe: "She began to do the dense, idiosyncratic writing she is now known for when she quit smoking in 1978: she couldn't write without cigarettes, so she began reporting a long New Yorker fact piece, on family therapy, called 'The One-Way Mirror.'" Her preference for writing in the first person was influenced by New Yorker colleague Joseph Mitchell, and she developed an interest in the construction of the auctorial subject as much as the objects it described, quickly realizing "this 'I' was a character, just like the other characters. It's a construct. And it's not the person who you are. There's a bit of you in it. But it's a creation. Somewhere I wrote, 'the distinction between the I of the writing and the I of your life is like Superman and Clark Kent.'" She turned this interest in the construction of narrative to a variety of subjects, including two books about couples (Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), one on Anton Chekhov, and the true crime genre, and particularly returned repeatedly to the subject of psychoanalysis.

She was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984), and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).

Malcolm wrote frequently about psychoanalysis and explored the relationship between journalist and subject.

She was known for her prose style and for polarizing criticism of her profession, especially in her most contentious work, The Journalist and the Murderer, which has become a staple of journalism-school curricula.

In 1981, Malcolm published a book on the modern psychoanalytic profession, following a psychoanalyst she gave the pseudonym “Aaron Green”.

Freud scholar Peter Gay wrote that Malcolm's "witty and wicked Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession has been praised by psychoanalysts (with justice) as a dependable introduction to analytic theory and technique. It has the rare advantage over more solemn texts of being funny as well as informative".

In his 1981 New York Times review, Joseph Edelson wrote that Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession "is an artful book", praising Malcolm’s "keen eye for the surfaces — clothing, speech and furniture — that express character and social role" (noting she was then the photography critic for The New Yorker).

It succeeds because she has instructed herself so carefully in the technical literature.

Above all, it succeeds because she has been able to engage Aaron Green in a simulacrum of the psychoanalytic encounter — he confessing to her, she (I suspect) to him, the two of them joined in an intricate minuet of revelation."

The book was a 1982 National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist.

Articles Malcolm published in The New Yorker and in her subsequent book In The Freud Archives (1984) offered, according to the book's dust jacket, "the narrative of an unlikely, tragic/comic encounter among three men."

They were psychoanalyst Kurt R. Eissler, psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and independent Freud scholar Peter J. Swales.

The book triggered a legal challenge by Masson, the former project director for the Sigmund Freud Archives.

In his 1984 lawsuit, Masson claimed that Malcolm had libeled him by fabricating quotations she attributed to him.

In August 1989, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco agreed with a lower court in dismissing a libel lawsuit that Masson had filed against Malcolm, The New Yorker and Alfred A. Knopf.

Malcolm claimed that Masson had called himself an "intellectual gigolo".

She also claimed that he said he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women, and fun" and claimed that he was, "after Freud, the greatest analyst that ever lived."

Malcolm was unable to produce all the disputed material on tape.

The case was partially adjudicated before the Supreme Court, which held that the case could go forward for trial by jury.

Malcolm's book created a sensation when in March 1989 it appeared in two parts in The New Yorker magazine.

Roundly criticized upon first publication, the book is still controversial, although it has come to be regarded as a classic, routinely assigned to journalism students.

It ranks ninety-seventh in The Modern Library's list of the twentieth century's "100 Best Works of Nonfiction".

Douglas McCollum wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, "In the decade after Malcolm's essay appeared, her once controversial theory became received wisdom."

In the posthumously published Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, Malcolm writes autobiographical sketches, starting the chapters from family photographs.

Malcolm's penchant for controversial subjects and tendency to insert her views into the narrative brought her both admirers and critics.

Malcolm's 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer begins with the thesis: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

Her example was the popular nonfiction writer Joe McGinniss.

While researching his true crime book Fatal Vision, McGinniss lived with the defense team of doctor Jeffrey MacDonald while MacDonald was on trial for the murders of his two daughters and pregnant wife.

In Malcolm’s reporting, McGinniss quickly arrived at the conclusion that MacDonald was guilty, but feigned belief in his innocence to gain MacDonald’s trust and access to the story—ultimately being sued by MacDonald over the deception.

After a decade of proceedings, a jury finally decided in Malcolm's favor on November 2, 1994 on the grounds that, whether or not the quotations were genuine, more evidence would be needed to rule against Malcolm.

In August 1995, Malcolm claimed to have discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotes, swearing "an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine."

Malcolm was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001.

Her papers are held at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, which acquired her archive in 2013.