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Every psychoanalyst knows how much her or his professional work is an expression of uniquely personal experiences of early development, professional training, and later-life events. Still, it is too seldom that we have a chance to hear our colleagues reflect at length on the particular ways in which this is true for them. Steven Kuchuck has given us this chance in a fine collection of essays gathered together under the title, Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst's Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional. Each of the writers included here understands that the work of analysis occurs only within the shifting and often unexpected currents of personal experience, which pull us off our “professional” footing into the confounding depths of our own histories. Of course, this is necessarily the case when it comes to the work of psychoanalysis which, like the navel of the dream, finally outruns all professional “technique” and reaches down into the unknown.
This has always been true, but because much of contemporary psychoanalysis, in all its interpersonal and relational variants, has put in question the rules of formal technique, including the classical “ideals” of abstinence, anonymity, and neutrality, it has revealed the very personal face of this work like never before. Still, although many have argued for the intersubjective, reciprocal, mutual, or co-constructed basis of clinical practice, there is still relatively little autobiographical writing on the subject of how the analyst's personal history shapes her or his theoretical and clinical choices in the consulting room. Of course, there are notable exceptions, as Kuchuck acknowledges in his introduction, citing, among others, work by Margaret Little, Richard Isay, Barbara Pizer, Darlene Ehrenberg, Patrick Casement, and Muriel Dimen—as well as several important collections, including The Human Dimension in Psychoanalytic Practice, edited by Kenneth Frank (1977), and The Therapist as Person, edite