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This is the patient's story of her analysis, or what purports to be an analysis, which was carried on for over four years. It makes rather wearisome reading; for somehow or other the negative transference seems to have been neatly by-passed.
The author is a professional journalist. Early on in the analysis she started to make notes about her sessions. She must have been pushed into doing this not only by the constant urge in herself to write, but also by the open admission of her analyst that he never took notes—and that was that, i.e. he apparently made no exploration of what that might mean to her. He, the analyst, seems to be a natural, human, tolerant sort of a man with a taste for indoor plants and dogs, and he is reported as saying a good many wise things.
The therapeutic result is, one judges, somewhat similar to what one might expect from a successful series of out-patient interviews or what can sometimes be accomplished in a lucky consultation or two.
The value of the book lies in the presentation at length of the course and outcome of psycho-therapeutic interviews, and at the same time it shows how unsatisfactory some analyses can be. Also it is interesting to get a picture of a Jewish family which is thoroughly Americanized.
Towards the end of the book, as the patient nears the ending-off of her treatment, one can sense her mounting anxiety that she will never get her identification with the analyst properly fixed. Her feverish attempts to hurl precepts and interpretations down her own throat, so to speak, are of no avail; so that one turns the last page with the din of shouting in one's ears.