You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is by now a cliché to write that psychoanalysis is the lonely profession of men and women who toil alone in their offices, their work privy only to their patients. Yet, with the burdens of confidentiality and the paucity of empirical data about practice, one can generally only guess what goes on within the psychoanalytic consulting room. ‘What exactly does he say to his patients?’ we wonder. ‘Does she really do what she says she does in her papers?’ ‘What would it be like to be supervised by him?’ In this fascinating book, Mary Kay O'Neil uses the words of one analyst's colleagues, supervisees, students, and (importantly!) analysands to remove the fourth wall of one psychoanalytic office to afford a rare glimpse inside.
Following its title, a conceit of this book is that it tells the story of not only one psychoanalyst but of the multitude of psychoanalysts who train and practice in relative obscurity. To be fair, though, O'Neil's subject was no ordinary psychoanalyst. Ruth Easser was a Canadian who trained and matured at the Columbia Psychoanalytic and Psychosomatic Clinic for Training and Research (hereafter Columbia) just after it was founded in 1944. Easser was there practically from the beginning, matriculating as a candidate in 1946, graduating in 1949 and appointed as a training analyst in 1954 at the age of 32. She was an influential teacher and sought-after supervisor at Columbia until she moved back to her native Toronto in 1970. Brilliant and successful,