Rachel Aviv on Janet Malcolm's "Trouble in the Archives"

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.

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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.