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In 1925, Sigmund Freud became the very first psychoanalyst to publish a professional autobiography, the famous Selbstdarstellung (An Autobiographical Study). Since that time, quite a considerable number of first, second, and third generation colleagues and disciples followed suit with their own more or less revealing autobiographical offerings, notably those by Franz Alexander, Leopold Bellak, Wilfred Bion, Helene Deutsch, Michael Fordham, Roy Grinker, Ernest Jones, Carl Gustav Jung, Ronald Laing, Margaret Little, Margaret Mahler, Jules Masserman, Esther Menaker, Karl Menninger, Sándor Radó, Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Reik, Wilhelm Stekel and Fritz Wittels - all published in the last half-century - with some as yet unpublished sketches by the formidable triumvirate of Melanie Klein, Clifford Scott and Donald Winnicott waiting in the wings.
Although the early psychoanalysts leapt into print with autobiographical gusto, perhaps because of their historical proximity to Freud, or as ambassadors of a new profession, later generations of clinicians have usually failed to do so. Of the 23 individuals listed above, only Dr Ronald D. Laing began his training after 1950. Apart from Laing, one would be hard pressed to find more recent professional autobiographies in the field of psychoanalysis. Perhaps this results from a greater triumph over narcissistic, exhibitionistic displays among more recently trained practitioners, or maybe modern workers have become more sensitive to the potentially adverse consequences of so much brazen self-revelation. To play devil's advocate, it may be that more recent, bourgeoisified, technocratized clinicians have very little to say, unlike our more revolutionary, pioneering forebears.
Amid this climate of relative silence about the detailed life-histories of more recently trained psychoanalysts, one greets with great relish the exquisitely well-styled professional autobiography of Professor John Gedo, arguably the most polemical graduate of the Chica