The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 1, 1993 by Richard Herrnstein

The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings, by Janet Malcolm (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 as story-telling. Freud's famous case histories read like novellas, 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 in the hunt for meaning. The title essay, "The Purloined Clinic," is about Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic, his gory 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.