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13: The Journalist and the Analyst: On Janet Malcolm feat. Sam Adler-Bell

Ordinary Unhappiness

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The Promethean Audacity of Freud in the Dora Case

Freud's failed analysis with a 18 year old who is basically like an object of sexual exchange in her family life. And he screws it up in a bunch of fascinating, endlessly productive ways for himself and also for the analytic tradition that falls in its wake. Malcolm reads Dora as Pandora, as Eve is the first woman; she kind of is responsible for unleashing the knowledge of good and evil into the world. But in meaning the knowledge, the plague of psychoanalysis for Freud, because what he has to deal with in order to metabolize his failure in the Dora case is invent so many of the essential sort of therapeutic and philosophical precepts of his enterprise.

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