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Psychoanalysis as effective, practical help for troubled humans (all of us, isn't it?) and also as a science of human nature, is, goodness knows, all too often portrayed in popular media as archaic or precious or both, and in any case best left to those who have both years and unlimited funds to spend on the self-indulgent endeavor of talking about themselves. To make matters worse, managed care agencies (“CBT vultures,” a friend recently characterized some of them that were offering jobs to her medical students) are descending on recent graduates of mental health disciplines across the board, threatening to push psychoanalysis even further toward the fringes of currently adopted treatment modalities.
These realities make even more imperative the need for psychoanalysts to do more writing for the general public, and to generate not only as much understanding as possible of analysis, but as a result of that, a desire to engage with it. To that end, Jane Goldberg's most recent work, My Mother, My Daughter, My Self, is an important book. Along with the pleasure to be had from it for any reader, practitioners should read it as a model for how this kind of writing can successfully be done.
Explaining—often one's first impulse—is not the answer. For a book to take root and make a difference, the psychoanalytic author must succeed at arousing real feelings in the reader, and thereby induce a more than intellectual, indeed almost physical desire to think more “analytically.” And crucial to that effort will be to find new words to be used for such age-old concepts as, for example, “regression” or “unconscious,” that will save the writing from becoming pedantic—too intellectual, too “inside,” so that the reader can engage with the story and have an emotional experience. As I will now venture to show you, Goldberg has achieved both goals.
Goldberg's book, written in three parts, takes us simultaneously deeper and deeper into both psychoanalysis and her own mind, like an unfolding