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In a collection of revealing and intimate essays, Arnold Rachman and Harold Kooden invite a variety of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, including the editors themselves, to reflect on the life experiences that preceded their clinical work, and to consider how their familial contexts, unique interests, and even their personal conflicts drew them to the field of psychology
and informed their subjective approaches to the work. As one might expect from such a project, the voices and orientations vary considerably. But a common theme emerges, namely that it is possible, perhaps likely or even inevitable, that clinicians will find commonalities between their professional vocations and the disparate passions that precede and run parallel to them. For example, Dan Gilhooley illuminates the similarities between his art practice—the way an image may emerge from the depths of his unconscious only to be understood as such after the fact—and the intersubjective field that arises between analyst and analysand. Similarly, Robert J. Marshall observes affinities between his love of both writing and jazz improvisation on the piano, and his spontaneity and creativity in session with his patients: “The similar styles, while in different realms, namely writing, conducting psychoanalysis, and improvising jazz, seem to stem from a common source and follow a similar common pathway” (p. 115). Each chapter contains such links between the author's earlier life and their work in the treatment room.
These lively, confessional accounts will be of interest to any reader appreciative of memoir as they often function as vignettes within that genre. Likewise, readers with a lay interest in psychology will appreciate the glimpse of “the other side of the couch,” to borrow Kooden's oft-repeated phrase. Any patient who has regarded their therapist as the cliche of objectivity, a “myth” that Phyllis Meadow (1987) notably explored in the pages of this very journal, will find much to suggest the hum