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.
The Analyst's Analyst Within by Lora Heims Tessman is a work that testifies to the author's compassionate exploration of the topic suggested by its title. As such it is an illuminating and sensitive reflection upon the stories of analysts, and the differences between ideas within theories and techniques when compared to the mindsets, dynamics, and pathos of the people who come to find themselves as analysts. Naturally such a topic does not unfold without contradictions and irony, the first of which is that the author sets about her task as if it were a work of social psychology suggesting that its value would be in the cool and clinical observations that lead to valid and reliable results. This proposition is countered by the author's poetic sensitivity for the anecdote, the person, and the process of continually coming to be alive within oneself and with another. The former structure gives the book a certain distance, whereas the latter gives the work a sense of value, colour and meaning. In the end this poetic sensibility holds the work together. It is as if her sensitivity becomes a beautiful device for reminding us that we are not to get lost in research methodology and presentation, but rather to remember her quoting of Antonia Machado: ‘Traveler, there is no road; the road comes into being as you go’ (p. 270).
The author's exploration of her topic begins with her thoughtful questions about the nature of the inner ‘analyst’ within the practising analyst. She then settles upon a primary concern for exploring ‘the process of remembered engagement and internalization as general phenomena’ (p. 2). Notably, the author saw it as ‘relevant to reflect on the role of a quotidian attitude, namely the participants’ theory of thought, an emotionally charged belief about whether one's own thinking is primarily dyadically or autoevoked (p. 4). The author moves from these questions through a short discussion of her interviewing process, and then introduces the reader to the ‘p