Years of Apprenticeship on the Couch: Tilman Moser, translated from the  German by Anselm Hollo, Orizen Book, New York, 1977.

Can a training analyst record the history of his own analysis and produce a book that is not basically awry or grandiose? Can such writing be something other than acting out? Will the loss of anonymity damage the analyst's career? These are questions raised by the author of Years of Apprenticeship and examined carefully by Heinz Kohut in a sensitive and thoughtful introduction to this forthright and daring book. Kohut himself confesses that ten years earlier he would have argued that such a book would reflect a major error in the analysis per se. The description of a professional psychoanalyst's analysis aimed at the general public must surely be an expression and repetition of an infantile experience through action and not “a remembering and coming to terms with the realization that these conflicts have no place in adult life” (Introduction, p. 4, Kohut). Today, Kohut and perhaps many of us might also assess this work differently. Years, subtitled “Fragments of my Psychoanalysis,” is not a systematic effort at recording an entire analysis as is available in the research works of Bergman, Knapp, or Simon. Nor is it a report that describes the way in which one's early life becomes rediscovered in psychoanalysis as John Nights' Successful Psychoanalysis has done. Rather Moser courageously tackles the question of how his psychoanalysis works. As an apprentice desirous of learning the craft, he gives careful attention to his experience and to the person behind the couch. Moser quickly describes the movement from the once-a-week, one-hour therapy and the prior failures at analysis. These are given minimal detail for this is not a day-by-day description of analytic work by analyst or analysand, but a sensitive, perceptive analysis of the craft of psychoanalysis and the special experiences of an analyst in training. There is the touching naivete of Moser who believed that he could go to the bathroom during an analytic hour merely to relieve himself. There is the courage wh