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It is rare for a book review to start with the sentence “I loved this book.” I am, however, going to take the liberty of starting this review with exactly that sentence. I loved this book. What a useful and lovely idea Robert Winer and Kerry Malawista had when they envisioned this project! They asked twenty-five analysts to answer a set of thirty-two questions they had put together for an interview with each analyst. Only twenty-one agreed to take part. After the interviews were transcribed, two subjects felt that too much was exposed in their interview and asked asked that it not be printed. Two others were not included for reasons not shared with us. Thus, the book contains seventeen interviews, with eleven male analysts and six female analysts, from the U.S. and several other nations.
Why did Winer and Malawista take on this project? They wanted, it seems, to explore various questions posed in their introduction: “What is it like to be a working psychoanalyst? … What do analysts experience in the course of meeting with their patients? How do they think about what they are doing? What is it like for them to take account of themselves? … To feel appreciated and then to feel devalued? To feel betrayed? To try to find ways to do what's possible? To feel responsibility for someone's life while working to maintain your own balance?” (p. xv).
Another reason is their realization that often in psychoanalysis case presentations are “so impersonal”: “neither the patient nor the analyst comes to life… . it's consistently hard to get a sense of what this person would be like for the analyst to sit with beyond the broad categorical framing (the patient is demanding, or insatiable, or self-demeaning, or