Transforming Lives is a compact, easy-to-read book of hope for analysands, candidates, and the field of psychoanalysis. Although the book's editor, Joseph Schachter, states that its goal is to help a potential analysand make the complex process of deciding to begin an analysis “better informed, clearer, and easier” (p. 1), Transforming Lives also helps psychoanalysts take a “better informed, clearer, and easier” view of the psychoanalytic experience.

The book is organized around seven chapters that describe seven analyses as written by their different and anonymous psychoanalysts. In addition, five of the analysts shared their chapters with their analysands (whose reactions are discussed in each chapter) and invited them to write up the analysis from their own points of