When I was Young, my psychologist-psychoanalyst father told me psychologists study “what makes people tick.” I was fascinated. My father's phrase made the world open up to me in a new way. My experience, it turns out, was not unique. Almost every author in this book—a series of autobiographical essays by psychotherapists of various persuasions about their career choices—at some point uses the word “fascination” to describe discovery of and excitement about the subject matter of the mental health disciplines.

The almost ecstatic tone of the essays is striking. For the most part, these writers love their work. They are thrilled to have found it. They feel they have hit the jackpot. The work of psychotherapy is satisfying on so many levels: intellectually, it is the highly stimulating study of the mind (the ultimate subject matter); emotionally, it affords continual intense and deeply intimate interactions with other people and with oneself (in conditions of relative safety and control); morally, it satisfies the