NONFICTION - Dec. 13, 1992

THE PURLOINED CLINIC by Janet Malcolm (Knopf: $23; 382 pp.) This isn’t the place to rehash Janet Malcolm’s past troubles (a psychoanalyst filed a landmark libel suit against her and the New Yorker after she allegedly fabricated quotations by him in two 1983 articles) except to note two things: Those articles are not included in this collection of four pieces on psychoanalysis, nine book reviews and three long profiles that Malcolm has written for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books since 1978. But issues of truth-telling and authenticity are central to them all.

In the title piece, Malcolm writes approvingly of art critic Michael Fried’s “disfiguring (a Thomas Eakins painting) almost beyond recognition” so that we can see it in new ways. In articles on family therapy (as witnessed from behind a one-way mirror) and on post-revolutionary malaise in Czechoslovakia, the country of her birth, she peels away defenses layer by layer until her interviewees look raw. In reviewing a biography of Victorian critic Edmund Gosse, she notes his pathological inability to get facts straight, then lets him halfway off the hook--”carelessness, sloppiness, misinformation, misquotation, and fudging of fact are commonplaces”--and then describes the sad fate of John Churton Collins, the “wrathful Defender of the Spirit of Fact” who had the temerity to expose Gosse’s errors.

It shouldn’t be unfair to Malcolm--who tends to explain people’s behavior in terms of Freudian irruptions from the unconscious--to speculate that her obsession with truth-telling is born of her own uneasiness on that score, just as certain womanizing members of Congress have exemplary records of voting for women’s rights. In either case, the good may outweigh the harm. The legislation gets passed; the moral urgency of Malcolm’s essays transcends their marginal or esoteric subject matter. She has a wicked way with the long sentence, which often ends with a stinger, like a scorpion’s tail. And few have ever written as clearly as she about that strangest of truth-mining operations, the excavation on the psychiatrist’s couch.