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Edited by well-known psychoanalyst Fred Busch, this book offers a collection of forty-three personal letters (including his own contribution) in which senior psychoanalysts share their experience, thoughts, and vision on the process of becoming an analyst and on the field more generally. Busch aims to provide up-and-coming analysts the opportunity to hear from an international ensemble of seasoned analysts so that more junior analytic clinicians might combat the pitfalls of parochialism, reflect on their own training, and start thinking about what kind of leaders they would like to be. The volume sets the stage for an intergenerational dialogue regarding the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis.
The letters, despite being written by analysts on several continents and with multiple theoretical preferences, contain remarkably similar observations and guidance. Their maxims include: read Freud and read Freud closely; do not get ensnarled in the old wars; your training analysis is yours alone and critical for your development; be active in analytic organizations and in the community at large; all analysts are in a process of becoming; develop your own psychoanalytic identity; tolerate not knowing; recognize that the place of psychoanalysis in the world has shifted dramatically; and let your patients be your teachers. While such reflections and suggestions will sound familiar to most candidates, they are powerful developmental and professional through lines, a sturdy foundation from which we can grow. This makes them important to contemplate and revisit often.
Many of the contributors, while speaking of their deep love for psychoanalysis, also evocatively forewarn all who enter training to beware (Donald Moss is the most emphatic in expressing these cautions). Beware of overidentification with your institute (or, for that matter, with your analyst, supervisors, teachers, or theories), beware of analytic certainty, beware of endogamy, and so on. At first, these co