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Psychoanalytical practitioners rarely publish memoirs. Indeed, most mental health specialists regard the details of our clinical work as so supremely confidential that many members of our community struggle to write anything at all! Perhaps we wish to protect not only the private lives of our patients but, also, our own. Those few who have written autobiographies have focused predominantly on their professional achievements, offering very little truly revealing personal information. Sigmund Freud's (1925) autobiographical study personifies this very tradition by having devoted the bulk of his memoir predominantly to an exploration of his life in the consulting room and in psychoanalytical organisations.
Over the years, a select group of psychoanalysts have, in fact, written book-length studies about both their professional and personal lives, including, inter alia, Theodor Reik (1949, 1956), Clarence Oberndorf (1958), Ernest Jones (1959), Melanie Klein (1959), Helene Deutsch (1973), Abram Kardiner (1977), Martin Grotjahn (1987), Margaret Mahler (1988), and, perhaps most famously of all, Carl Gustav Jung (1962).
Although the early generations of psychoanalysts did pen autobiographies from time to time, more contemporary clinicians have rarely dared to do so by and large, perhaps due to the anxiety of the internet and to the ready accessibility of any published text.
Fortunately, for readers, Professor Richard Chessick, born in 1931 and still practising while in his late eighties, has provided us with a wonderfully engaging and revealing memoir, Apologia Pro Vita Mea: An Intellectual Odyssey, which chronicles his life in psychoanalysis from the 1950s until the present day. An accomplished and prolific writer, whose compendious publications span seven decades, Chessick seems the ideal candidate to pen the story of his psychoanalytical life across more than sixty years of practice.
As someone who entered the psychoanalytical establishment in the 1950s, Richard Chessick may