Skip to product information
1 of 1

In the Freud Archives

In the Freud Archives

written and with an afterword by Janet Malcolm

Regular price $17.95
Regular price $0.00 Sale price $17.95
Format

In the Freud Archives tells the story of an unlikely encounter among three men: K. R. Eissler, the venerable doyen of psychoanalysis; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a flamboyant, restless forty-two-year-old Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst turned virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a mischievous thirty-five-year-old former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar. At the center of their Oedipal drama are the Sigmund Freud Archives—founded, headed, and jealously guarded by Eissler—whose sealed treasure gleams and beckons to the community of Freud scholarship as if it were the Rhine gold.

Janet Malcolm’s fascinating book first appeared some twenty years ago, when it was immediately recognized as a rare and remarkable work of nonfiction. A story of infatuation and disappointment, betrayal and revenge, In the Freud Archives is essentially a comedy. But the powerful presence of Freud himself and the harsh bracing air of his ideas about unconscious life hover over the narrative and give it a tragic dimension.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590170274
Pages: 176
Publication Date:

Praise

A superbly skilled portrait of a bizarre, cloistered world and the obsessed men who guard it or try to break it open. From beginning to end it has the coolly accomplished excitement of a thriller.
— Sean French, Sunday Times (London)

In this brilliant and enjoyable book, a major crisis within one of the most important systems of ideas of our century is presented in the style of a movie vehicle for Jack Nicholson.
— Anthony Quinton, Times Literary Supplement

In the Freud Archives dramatizes with almost Jamesian elegance a falling out between certain members of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and a couple of young scholars...Janet Malcolm unfolds the entire story with shrewdness, a sharp eye and admirable wisdom.
— Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

View full details
  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 
  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 
  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it