The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings.The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings, by Janet Malcolm Janet Malcolm (born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on the staff of The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, and Inside the Freud Archives. (Knopf, 382 pp., $23) PSYCHOANALYSIS, art, and Czechoslovakia, the author's birthplace, provide the settings for this collection of lucid, elegant essays. One theme is psychotherapy psychotherapy, treatment of mental and emotional disorders using psychological methods. Psychotherapy, thus, does not include physiological interventions, such as drug therapy or electroconvulsive therapy, although it may be used in combination with such methods. as story-telling. Freud's famous case histories read like novellas This literature-related list is incomplete; you can help by [ expanding it]. This is a selected list of novellas that have gained fame and/or critical and public acclaim. , but the master himself warned against substituting narrative closure for therapeutic benefit. Janet Malcolm's distinctions between unwarranted story-making and the leaps of imagination that psychotherapy requires may not exhaust the subject, but are nonetheless a wonder of subtlety. The therapeutic encounter isn't the only place where people go astray a·stray adv. 1. Away from the correct path or direction. See Synonyms at amiss. 2. Away from the right or good, as in thought or behavior; straying to or into wrong or evil ways. in the hunt for meaning. The title essay, "The Purloined Clinic," is about Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic, his gory go·ry adj. go·ri·er, go·ri·est 1. Covered or stained with gore; bloody. 2. Full of or characterized by bloodshed and violence. masterpiece of surgery on a man's thigh being performed in front of a classroom full of medical students, and about an art critic's attempt to make sense of Eakins's having inserted himself into the scene, off in an obscure part of the audience, bunched over pad and pencil. The painting is more fundamentally about painting than about surgery. Why is the clinic "purloined"? Poe's purloined letter was concealed in full view on the culprit's desk. So in art, therapy, and ordinary life, meaning is often hidden on the surfaces. For any lover of the essayist's art, this book is a treat. |
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