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Thirty-one psychoanalytically oriented clinicians were asked by Joseph Reppen to write essays discussing why they became psychotherapists. The resulting collection, Why I Became a Psychotherapist, is well worth reading. Roughly half the authors are remarkably open in describing in detail how traumatic events during childhood, primarily maternal depression or separation from parents, determined their choice of career. Their candid reporting and reflections provide the reader unusual opportunity to empathize with the authors as courageous, strong-willed human beings able to persevere through great pain. Their stories illustrate how individuals can grow and repair, and then use what they have learned to help others. Examples such as these are particularly valuable for young clinicians and those in training. Anisfeld, whose mother lost a child in the Holocaust, expresses the conviction that “becoming a psychotherapist would be the sublimation of my compulsive need to reinstate the survivor's loss of a sense of personal agency” (p. 16). Eigen describes therapy as “a safe haven for being with another” (p. 80). He explains his becoming an analyst as “an attempt to mend the unmendable” (p. 81), to bring his dead brother back to life; this death and his mother's inability to recover, he says, led him led to work with patients who had been given up on by other therapists. Gargiulo, having discussed his personal experience in child therapy and his mother's depression during his adolescence, reflects that he “always knew that pain could be an emotional bridge to others, not just a personal prison with mirrors” (p. 97). Citing Winnicott, he wonders if one becomes a psychoanalyst to find help for one's own aliveness, as well as that of others.