Janet Malcolm
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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.
Malcolm is best known for the $10 million lawsuit triggered by Inside the Freud Archives in 1991, when psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson sued for $10 million after claiming that Malcolm had fabricated explosive quotations by him. After several years of proceedings, the court found against Masson.
Craig Seligman wrote of her: "Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness ... Malcolm's blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles." [1]
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[edit] Background
Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, one of two daughters--the other is author Marie Winn-- of a psychiatrist father, but has lived in the United States since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. She was educated at the University of Michigan and lives in New York. Her first husband was Donald Malcolm who reviewed books for the New Yorker in the 50's and 60's. Her second husband, (m. 1975) Gardner Botsford, a long time editor at the New Yorker, died at age 87 in September 2004. The book jackets of her earliest works record her as "living in New York with her husband and daughter". Her daughter is also mentioned in the text of The Crime of Sheila McGough.
[edit] Masson case
In The Freud Archives triggered a $10M legal challenge by Jeffrey Masson, former project director for the Freud archives, who claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating quotations by him that brought him into disrepute.
In the disputed quotations, Masson called himself an "intellectual gigolo," who had slept with over 1000 women; 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 (see the opinion at Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (89-1799), 501 U.S. 496 (1991)), and after years of proceeedings, a jury finally found against Masson in 1994.
[edit] The Journalist and the Murderer
The thesis of The Journalist and the Murderer is contained in its first sentence: "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."
Malcolm's example was popular author Joe McGinniss, author of The Selling of the President, who ingratiated himself into the bosom of the defense team of former Green Beret doctor Jeffrey MacDonald, then on trial for the 1970 murder of his pregnant wife and two daughters. McGinniss's Fatal Vision concluded that MacDonald was a psychopath high on amphetamines when he killed his family. McGinniss's "morally indefensible" act, in Malcolm's view, was to pretend that he believed MacDonald was innocent, even after he became convinced of his guilt, in order to remain privy to defense-team strategies.
[edit] Works
- Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography (1980)
- Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981)
- In The Freud Archives (1984)
- The Journalist and The Murderer (1990)
- The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings (1992), which contains the essays "A Girl of the Zeitgeist" and "The Window Washer"
- The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (1994)
- The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999)
- Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001)
[edit] References
- Janet Malcolm by Craig Seligman, Salon.com, February 29, 2000
