IT IS MORE than fitting that the religion the twentieth century chose to bequeath to history was psychoanalysis. More grimly deterministic than anything any Calvinist or Marxist could conceive, it is proper faith of a century in which men seem to get better at doing just about everything while events get more and more absurdly out of control. Revealed through the agency of a Viennese Jew who alternately wore the hats of humanist, scientist, prophet and pariah, psychoanalysis is a creed without a salvation. There are no elect, and the priesthood does not claim to be holier than the laity. Adhered to by few, it is understood by fewer still. Ultimately, it probably satisfies no one.

Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession is a timely and masterful foray into the practice and penetralia of this modern mystery religion. Timely because since the golden age of piety of the fifties--when Salinger's Seymour Glass frolicked blithely with bananafish while his new bride chatted with her mother about what all the "goddam" analysts thought about that peculiar young man--psychoanalysis has been receding from, the public eye. After these years of gestalt therapy, est, and, yes, hot tubs (who can really believe that a neighborhood of fools sitting in a tub of scalding water is therapy?), it seems right to return to Freud. After all, it was he who maintained from the start that the best that could be hoped for was the conversion of "hysterical misery into common unhappiness".

Malcolm takes as her task the shrinking of the big picture into the small book. Devoting long sections to expositions of orthodox Freudian thought and occasionally to the ideas of some of the myriad of dissenters, the author provides a lucid introduction to such often misunderstood concepts as the Oedipal complex, penis envy, and the tripartite scheme of the mind. Her delvings are in themselves persuasive arguments. Along with some of the history of the psychoanalytic movement--she assiduously avoids Adler and Jung--the author provides a rather scorching insight into the analytic establishment. The image of these beacons of the analytic community, privy to the holy of holies of the human mind, playing mean and vicious power games and displaying no small modicum of paranoia, induces a sobering feeling about what the phrase "psychic determinism" actually means.

All this exegesis, though fascinating and never pedantic, is subordinate to the central question of the book: what does the analyst do? What is the substance of this weird, almost inscrutable relationship with the patient? What goes on in those quiet rooms with thin venetian blinds, and potted plants for 50 minutes a day, four or five times a week, for five, six or seven years? It is easy to conjure the now hackneyed image of one person sitting in a chair with a pad and pencil while another lies on a couch. It is impossible to imagine what they could talk about for seven years. No one's problems can be that deep.

YES THEY ARE, comes the answer from analyst "Aaron Green", the central figure in The Impossible Profession. And, as Green reveals in his discussions with Malcolm, the way to get at the neuroses is through the cultivation of a transference with the analyst. Here begins the great mirror game that is analysis.

When he coined the term transference, Freud meant the process by which we define others, the way we seem them according to "early blueprints" from out first six years. Only in rare moments do we ever see each other as we are. The rest of the time, we perceive only the shadows cast by psychic scars unknown at the conscious level. Malcolm writes:

"The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equinamity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities--personal relations--is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even for especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has as core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic--we cannot knew each other... A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. 'Only connect,' E. M. Forster proposed. 'Only we can't,' the psychoanalyst knows."

Transference lies at the heart of The Impossible Profession; its endless variations constitute the theme of the book's analysis--the analysis of Aaron Green by Malcolm. How does the analyst abnegate his personality in the analytic relationship to allow the patient to project onto him the deepest levels and thereby gain small measure of catharsis? How does the analyst gesture obliquely at what he sees at the root of the patient's suffering? What can the patient benefit from all this mental tinkering? And finally, how does the analyst handle his own "counter transference", his impression of the patient?

JANET MALCOLM HANDLES these questions deftly. If, as Aaron Green contends, analysts are voyeurs "at the window watching what's going on in the bedroom, getting very excited, but not jumping into the fray," then Malcolm gives a solid boost to anyone who wants to be a meta-voyeur--someone to peep in on the bedroom and the first voyeur too. She falters only once, rambling through several pages of some sort of amateur Jungian explanation of Freud's motivations for giving a particular patient pseudonym. Except for this humorously obsessional bit of lay analysis, Malcolm has an intelligent authorial presence. Drawing from an obviously broad reading, within and without the field of psychoanalysis, her allusions are perceptive and occasionally brilliant. She never degenerates into literary gushing.

Yet, there is one last problem. A staff writer on The New Yorker, Malcolm is an adept practitioner of that serious-but-silky prose. The writing is polished and stainless; there is something appropriate about both her and Green speaking in the cultured dialect of the uptown Manhattan brownstone. It seems the entire dramatis personae of the New York Psychoanalytic Society must speak roughly the same way. Nonetheless, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession is fascinating. But the powerful ideas of psychoanalysis and the murkiness they dredge out of all our sick psyches somehow require a more patient, vigorous prose.