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In what may be the first of its kind, Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the chair of the International Psychoanalytic Association's Cultural Committee, decided in 2020 to invite members and associates to participate in a short-story contest with the goal of publishing the 30 best stories. The result is The Analyst as Storyteller/El Analista Como Narrador , a compilation of these tales appearing in both English and Spanish. Many analysts are drawn to fiction, Schmidt-Hellerau observes in the foreword, because it “fosters their capacity to immerse themselves in still inarticulate experience, some of which may seem of minor importance yet already carry the heart of the matter at stake” (p. ix). Interestingly, the “heart of the matter,” as Sander Gilman et al. (1994) observe in Reading Freud's Reading, is the “line which Sigmund Freud scribbled in the margin of a number of his books when he found what seemed to him the essence of a text and its author” (p. xiii). It is no surprise that Schmidt-Hellerau has edited a volume of fiction, for she herself is a creative writer, the author of Memory's Eyes: A New York Oedipus Novel .
The response to the invitation, Schmidt-Hellerau remarks, exceeded her expectations. She and the ten judges, all psychoanalysts, received submissions from 252 analysts from the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and India. The analysts range in age from young, still involved in psychoanalytic training, to elderly and in retirement. Ten of the authors are male, the remaining female. The stories are indeed short, ranging in length from under three pages to seven. Narrowing the selection to the
best 30 must have been daunting, but the result is a treasure trove. I found the tales intriguing, and it was difficult to limit myself to discussing a handful.
Tellingly, few of the stories are about psychoanalysis. An unhappy c