players of games
three janet malcolm books
In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm. 1984. 165pp.
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Janet Malcolm. 1981. 174pp.
Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Janet Malcolm. 2011. 155pp.
Janet Malcolm was a writer for The New Yorker from 1963; she died recently in 2021. She wrote these books, as well as many others, on psychoanalysis and the justice system, and other things.
The case of Iphigenia centres on a woman from a small fundamentalist Jewish community who is accused of having her husband murdered over a custody dispute. A short observation in Iphigenia suggests a thoroughline between Malcolm’s two seemingly distant subjects: the analytic office and the court.
You don’t often hear [defiant speech from a witness on the stand] in a courtroom. Witnesses are willing, sometimes even eager, to play the game of matching wits with an adversary who is sure to defeat them because he is a professional and they are amateurs. Ezra’s refusal to play—his continued protests against being questioned in a way people aren’t questioned in life outside the courtroom—brought into sharp relief the artificial and, you might even say, inhuman character of courtroom discourse. (56)
Artificial, certainly—but surely not inhuman. The special set of rules by which human beings conduct themselves in these rooms came from nobody but us. These are ritual rooms, carnival rooms, in which the normal rhythms of discourse are suspended. All parties step into a magic circle and agree, even if for lack of another option, to the structured rules of an elaborate conversation-game.
Analysis really does have certain qualities of a game, or perhaps of free play. Analysts evidently hold sacred special rules, such as the number of days one will play in a week, the terms on which a session can be cancelled, the season in which one can take a time-out, and the exact duration of each session to the minute (unless you’re Lacan). As far as I can tell from the testimony of analysts and analysands so far, there’s no prize and you can’t win. They don’t know how long the game will last—maybe over a decade. They seem to keep going mainly because it’s interesting.
Across all cadres of life, all social interactions have these unwritten genre constraints to varying extents. Even during a simple conversation, each interlocutor takes turns. “Turn-taking” is, yes, the formal linguistic terminology. If you begin to pay attention, you will notice how your tone dips or rises to hold or give up your turn, how you time your pauses, how you gesture, to signal to your interlocutors whether you want to keep talking or whether you want to give them the floor.
Rules like this are comforting. They scaffold our interactions along decided structures of propriety. Following the rules is reassuring and signals fellow-feeling. When somebody else is following the rules we presume they are on our side, and if they break the rules in a way we dislike, we begin to suspect a lack of consideration for us. In this way, these rules serve to regulate our emotions much more than they serve to perform survival tasks efficiently or whatever. (Of course, the regulation of emotions is a survival task.)
Both the analyst’s office and the courtroom contain interactions during which emotions become heightened. Under these circumstances, regularizing the interaction has the particular effect of making the container more predictable and thus more tolerable for the human reagents.
Moral psychologist Fiery Cushman calls the justice system an “institutional exaptation”: an institutionalized means to manifest each-of-our individual, subjective desires to see certain people punished, which bears the cost for us of personally punishing them that would otherwise be prohibitive. If so, a regularization or channelling of our emotional impulses through the institution, rather than real neutrality—whatever that means—may well be the best we could hope for.
What struck me most rereading In the Freud Archives in particular is the subtle, funny irony that Malcolm maintains without comment. This is a book about how the personal and ideological conflicts between three scholars of Freud led to a vociferous feud that tore apart the field of Freud biography. Here are the secular priests, educated for decades in the arcane labryinths of the human mind. (At least, they hold the opinion that they possess special expertise; the reader can decide whether she believes in the actual tenets of psychoanalysis. Malcolm is delicately neutral.) Yet the personal lives of these experts on desire are as scuttled as any of ours by their seemingly inalienable flaws of character, of which they seem quite unaware. Or, if they are aware, they like being that way and don’t want to change. Malcolm’s observations have the effect, one imagines, of a good psychoanalytic interpretation—laconic sentences that have the idle construction of passing thoughts but convey great significance. One protagonist “admits to error so frequently, and with such almost childlike eagerness, that the admissions have become a sort of personal signature (71).” The other, stripped of his funds by a lawsuit, winds up in a suburban bungalow, “heating up, with a nonplussed air, a Stouffer’s frozen meal (145).”
In the courtroom, too, human foibles overdetermine decisions despite our best efforts. The outcome of a trial hinges mainly on which of the lawyers seems right to the jury. “Hang ‘em Hanophy,” the judge presiding over the courtroom in Iphigenia, rushes the matter to go on vacation. Malcolm implies that he uses the whole trial, perhaps all trials, as a means to satisfy his personal desire to punish. (Punish who? perhaps anyone—punishment is reinforcing to the punisher, as is known to scholars of law as well as parrot trainers.)
Human fallibility may have been one of Malcolm’s key interests, particularly in the very arenas where we most endeavour to keep it at bay. She repeatedly compares the trial in Iphigenia to a tragedy—classical in the title, Russian in the conclusion. The main thing about a tragedy, of course, is that the ending is set from the start. You have no hope of overcoming the consequences of your nature. You may not even know what this nature is. You can go to all the doctors you like. Something may change, or not. Certainly, you have no choice but to see yourself through to the end.