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This book is a vivid account of a psychiatrist's life, told mainly through experience of three therapies—with a Jungian, Freudian and finally a Kleinian analyst, which she found by far the most satisfactory. Before reading the book, I had a number of concerns and questions, many of which remained with me after I had read it. These were to do with the problematic nature of such an autobiography, the description of an analysis by the analysand. For example, although such an account may give valuable insight into what it feels like to be a patient, does it provide anything more substantial, such as insight into the process itself? And, then, how much of the account can the reader simply believe, given how difficult it is to differentiate the real person of the analyst from his phantasy aspects? Is the account itself a piece of acting out, for example, is it designed to show up or over-praise the analyst, and is thus a consequence of an unresolved or unanalysed transference? Is the account merely a distortion, or a genuine product? In the introduction to his autobiographical novel, Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham describes how, 'fact and fiction are inextricably mingled; the emotions are my own, but not all the incidents are related as they happened, and some of them are transferred to my hero not from my own life but from that of persons with whom I was intimate'. Thus there is a distortion of facts, but in the service of artistic illusion, which may turn out to be in fact more 'truthful' than an autobiography. Finally, there may be a danger of making the account of the analysis over-exciting, with a kind of exhibitionistic display of suffering. I am not at all implying that Dr Herman's book suffers from all these faults, but I do think that it might have gained in depth and distance if she had brought some of these doubts into the text.
The writer, Antonia White, has a marvellous description of her own analysis, which I think captures more successfully wha