The Analyst: A Daughter's Memoir. By Alice Wexler. New York:  Columbia University Press, 2022,  282 pp., $35.00 hardcover. DOI:

Milton Wexler is a forgotten figure in the history of psychoanalysis. Alice Wexler's book rehabilitates him while contextualizing the controversies and ruptures that marked his life. Wexler is never mentioned locally at the analytic institute where he belonged for almost 15 years, from 1951 to 1965. His name and clinical activities were erased. Perhaps the amnesia illustrates a lack of interest in local psychoanalytic history, perhaps a willed ignorance. This book is a necessary corrective. Without having met Wexler, I write this essay with admiration for the man and his work. He tried to ascend mountains that needed to be climbed and that other colleagues avoided or sidestepped. He attempted to be effective in the treatment of extremely disturbed patients and, subsequently, with those who have Huntington disease. Challenging and transgressing traditional analytic “rules” in ways considered deviations, rogue, or inappropriate, he was a doer, not just one who interpreted. His practice and writings on the real relationship between the patient and the analyst, while anticipating the perspectives of contemporary relational analysis, were dismissed by many psychoanalysts as “nonanalytic” or “wild.” Milton Wexler was a pioneer and an experimenter.

Alice Wexler is not the only daughter to write a memoir of a father who was a celebrated psychoanalyst. Sue Erikson Bloland, the daughter of Erik H. Erikson, has written a deidealizing portrait of her father, attempting to reconcile the contradictions of his public image as wise,

intimate, charismatic, and a beloved celebrity versus her experience of him as narcissistically vulnerable and inadequate, with persistent difficulties in living, relating, and parenting. Debunking the fairy-tale image of Erikson, Bloland (2005) portrays him realistically and complexly and reveals his fallibilities despite the aura of fame surro