Self-Examination in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Countertransference and Subjectivity in Clinical Practice by William F. Cornell,  Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2019,  166 pp.

I have to confess that at the time I volunteered to review this book I was not familiar with the author's name, and I did not really know what to expect. This only testifies to my ignorance, as Dr. William Cornell is a distinguished and seasoned psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and supervisor, who has published numerous papers and several books. In the 40 years of experience as both a clinician and an author, Dr. Cornell has built a crossover between psychoanalysis and other psychotherapy traditions, like transactional analysis and somatic therapy. Throughout this book, I appreciated the freshness of this approach of liberated, undogmatic exploration of what could be most helpful to the patient, whichever school of thought it might be coming from.

I was initially attracted by the term “self-examination” in the title of the book. As everything started with Freud's attempt to overcome his depression, his self-analysis (Anzieu, 1986; Bonomi, 2015), I hoped this book would be about us, about how psychoanalysts explore themselves, because—and please don't tell my patients!—for me that has always been the most interesting thing about our job: while trying to help other people, getting to know other minds, you are, more than anything else, getting to know yourself as a person and constantly examining yourself as a professional. I always recommend anyone looking for a therapist to inquire about the number of hours they have spent in personal analysis, and I am, thus, always curious to eavesdrop on any practicing psychoanalyst and see what that can teach me about my work with patients. When it comes to this, William Cornell's book does not disappoint at all. Quite the opposite. Cornell offers insights, techniques, recommendations, and, yes, self-examination, that will take you more time to digest than the modest number of 166 pages of text suggests.

The book is full of presentations of patients' life- and therapy-stories, and parts of it read like “psychotherapy prose,” the genr