As Janet Malcolm worked on “Trouble in the Archives,” a two-part piece about prominent psychoanalysts who disagreed about Freud, she began a correspondence with Kurt Eissler, the head of the Sigmund Freud Archives. Perhaps no journalist has ever been so attentive to the emotional dynamics in the encounter between writer and subject, the transferences that obscure our ability to take in the reality of a relationship. Malcolm often coolly described the aftermath of such projections, but drafts of her letters to Eissler, preserved in Yale’s archives, capture an experience of escalating intimacy. She had planned for her piece to center on Jeffrey Masson, an unorthodox Freudian scholar who had become Eissler’s nemesis. But, in a letter to Eissler written toward the end of 1982, she said she now felt that “the animating consciousness should be yours. To put it bluntly, I find you more interesting than Masson.”
They began to have evening conversations, often at Eissler’s apartment. “I am less and less aware that you are working for a publication,” Eissler wrote her. Five days later, he observed, “It’s so rare that one feels free to talk more or less without inhibition to somebody and has the feeling the other party does the same.” Professional considerations did not diminish “the charm + beauty of the ‘event’ for it is an event for me,” he wrote.
Malcolm seemed similarly carried away. “I would frankly rather give up the whole project than cause you distress,” she wrote. Her letters were exuberant, tender, and sometimes mischievous. Once, she described how Masson had slept over at her house and, when he came down for breakfast in the morning, criticized one of Eissler’s books. Then she wondered about “my motives in gratuitously reporting to you Masson’s reaction. . . . How perverse we all are! The last thing in the world I would have wanted was to give you cause ‘to complain’ about me.”
Both Eissler and Malcolm seemed to worry that there was something inappropriate about the “personal glow,” as Eissler put it, of their correspondence. “Your mind is too penetrating for my liking,” he wrote. Later, he announced, “I shall have to make an unpleasant decision during the next few hours or days, namely whether I should continue to write you letters of this kind.” By the next sentence, he seemed to have reached his decision: the correspondence could continue, if it was for a “limited duration. The gods do not grant us joy for a long time, they are right we get so quickly spoiled.”
Shortly before the piece was published, Malcolm wrote Eissler that she was in a “terrible bind about this. Although the piece is what brought us together, I fear that it is what will tear us apart.” Eissler assured her that, even if she wrote about him in a “mildly evil way, I still would think of you with gratitude and appreciation in my heart.”
In the article, published at the end of 1983, Malcolm describes Eissler’s “singular mixture of brilliance, profundity, originality, and moral beauty on the one hand, and willfulness, stubbornness, impetuosity, and maddening guilelessness on the other.”
A few weeks after the piece came out, Eissler sent back a book by Jorge Luis Borges that Malcolm had given him. “Should I interpret the return of my book as a tidying up of loose ends at the end of a relationship, or should I see it as a sign of your continuing friendliness and good will?” she asked in a letter. It appears that the first interpretation was more accurate. Four days later, he wrote that he was dismayed by some of the details her piece had divulged. “I decided to terminate our relationship,” he wrote.
Malcolm wrote to Eissler that she had recently defended him in public when someone accused him of moral lapses: “I had never intended to tell you about it, but your harsh and implacable letter has made me feel somewhat bitter, and caused me to wonder whether my loyalty to you isn’t a little ridiculous.”
Reading the letters, I felt as if I were accessing secrets about Malcolm’s reporting, perhaps even a romantic drama never before revealed, but in fact I wasn’t discovering anything that she hadn’t already articulated. “A correspondence is a kind of love affair . . . tinged by a subtle but palpable eroticism,” she wrote in “The Journalist and the Murderer,” published six years later. “It is with our own epistolary persona that we fall in love, rather than with that of our pen pal.” ♦
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