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“Dear Candidate, As a first-year candidate, I remember attending the initial meeting of what was to become our local candidate organization. We met at another candidate's home, and I wondered why we were getting together there and not at the Institute where all the other meetings were held. As we began, I sensed, though it was not said directly, that this gathering was not one that some senior member of the Institute would approve of” (p. xxii).
So writes Fred Busch in the introduction to this collection of letters, in which senior analysts invited by Busch each write a letter to today's candidates in which they recall their own training and offer suggestions and advice to candidates in training today. This book both marks and embodies the changes in our profession. No longer is the analyst only a blank screen, available for the projection of fantasies; the analyst is now a real person, whose thoughts can be known. Busch has assembled forty-three letters, solicited from senior analysts practicing in the three regions of the International Psychoanalytical Association: Latin America, Europe, and North America. The cultural differences in institutes reflected in these letters is one of the many pleasures of this book; they serve to introduce the reader, and particularly the candidate for whom this volume is intended, to an international overview of our profession. Missing, however, are any of the well-known senior analysts of color practicing in the United States: Beverly Stoute, Anton Hart, and Dionne Powell, to name a few, all of whom have recently contributed prominently to The American
Pschoanalyst (TAP), the newsletter of the American Psychoanalytic Association. This omission is both puzzling and dismaying, particularly as our profession is belatedly focusing on diversity and inclusion.
That said, there are twenty-four letters from a range of countries outside the U.S. I found these letters to be of special interest, an opportunity to hear voices less familiar to