4 ideas
Janet Malcolm profiles a middle-aged Freudian analyst she calls Aaron Green. His case shows the analytic stance being held up by a man who is himself unanalyzed in places, bound by the same transferences he interprets in others.
Transference is the patient's unconscious reenactment of old attachments and conflicts, usually with parents, aimed at the analyst, who is experienced as someone he is not. The analyst's neutrality works as a blank screen, so these distortions show up clearly enough to be interpreted rather than acted on. The same mechanism operates in all ordinary relationships: we never meet others purely as they are, only through the templates of earlier figures.
Taking Freud's line that analysis, like education and government, is certain to yield unsatisfying results, Malcolm argues that the analyst's task cannot be fully achieved. Analysis cannot cure the human condition. It can only replace neurotic misery with ordinary unhappiness, and the analyst must work on patients while never escaping his own unconscious.
Seen through Green's institute, psychoanalytic factionalism, including the feuds between orthodox Freudians and revisionists like Kohut and the jockeying for training-analyst status, looks like the same familial jealousy, idealization, and parricidal rivalry the theory describes. Training analyses create lineages of analytic 'children' whose loyalties and grudges replay parent-child dynamics. The institution therefore reenacts the pathology its members are trained to interpret.