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To read The Possible Profession: The Analytic Process of Change is to take a master's class in the art of psychoanalysis taught by a consummate clinician and theorist in matters of therapeutic action and technique. Jacobs also displays his skills as an accomplished writer and storyteller able to create an entertaining, at times compelling reading experience that powerfully resonates with the communicative matters at the heart of his work. The clinical vignettes with which this volume is replete are both exquisitely personal and at the same time scholarly as he embraces the central debates and controversies of the psychoanalytic times in which he has lived.
In his 1991 book, The Use of the Self: Countertransference and Communication in the Analytic Situation, Jacobs charted the territory that has continued to occupy his professional thought and writing for these succeeding two decades. That book collected in one volume the groundbreaking contributions he had published between 1973 and 1990, works that opened new vistas in the understanding of therapeutic communication in clinical psychoanalysis. The volume now at hand traces the rich elaboration of those seminal ideas, which to a significant degree have been on the leading edge of contemporary psychoanalytic dialogue. A classically trained analyst in the ego psychological tradition, Jacobs has challenged many tenets once sacrosanct, always with an eye to the therapeutic aims of the analytic endeavor. He has been a pioneer in the study of the intersection of the intra- and intersubjective dimensions of the psychoanalytic encounter, while at the same time asking us to consider whether the current emphasis on interaction and intersubjectivity is taking us away from the heart and core of analysis: “Clothed in modern, sophisticated terms, does this focus actually disguise and rationalize the basic tendency in all of us—the ever-present wish to avoid both the anxiety, the pain, and the disruption that inevitably accompany i