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Analysis is something that is generally conducted in intense and rigorous privacy, a state broken, on the analyst's part, only by the needs of professional consultation and supervision, and by the less common—but still insistent—demand that the profession makes to have the work written about in a way that furthers our understanding of our difficult endeavour. Typically, when analysts write, they do so about their analysis of others; when patients write, they do so about their own (Morley 2007). It is a very rare thing to come across an analyst writing about their own analysis and its impact over time, together with accounts of their work with patients, and with patients' accounts of their experience of the work. In this sense, Jane Haynes' book is a radical departure from the norm.
It is also self-published and available over the internet as an e-book, a mode of transmission that potentially can make writing more accessible than relying on established publishers' and distribution networks. What self-publishing may lack are the services of well-informed and expert editors who can act as a critical sounding board to the project, encouraging some aspects of the text and playing down others.
Haynes' book is a determined leap into a debate about how much should be talked about by analysts of their own history and about their work, and it takes a clear position that rigorous ‘analytic’ silence can and should be broken from time to time—particularly in print when accompanied by the voice of the patient. This is both an experiential position and a theoretical one on Haynes’ part. It makes her book simultaneously valuable, as an account of what it means to be an analyst—the multitude of feelings, thoughts, bodily states, reactions and so on that happen in the presence of, and as the result of, our interactions with our patients—and very disturbing, as a deliberate act of transgression of ‘traditional’ analytic boundaries.
It is also a terribly sad, painful, and resolute book. I