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Karen J. Maroda approaches the difficult and customarily avoided territory of the psychoanalyst’s personal life in her fourth and most recent book, The Analyst’s Vulnerability: Impact on Theory and Practice. The author anchors her text in a central premise few of us would dispute: the psychoanalyst’s need to be a psychoanalyst took root early in life. In short, our childhoods chose this profession for us. Among the many clear and direct assertions she makes throughout her book, Maroda offers this compelling statement in the opening chapter:
Acknowledging how this work helps us to find ourselves, maintain ourselves, and transform ourselves is essential to doing it well…an overall examination of how and why we became therapists, what we as individuals are particularly looking for and gratified by in the process, and in what ways we are limited
Page 788by biases formed in childhood could open up a whole new dialogue. [p. 171]
I found this initial framing to be a refreshing invitation with considerable potential to evoke, reach, and set in motion a different kind of discourse that more fully engages the psychoanalyst’s personal vulnerabilities and their perennial impact on clinical and theoretical practices.
Maroda structures her book into two parts that do not do justice to her more expansive trifecta of the analyst’s quest to find, maintain, and transform ourselves in our work. Part I includes three promising chapters devoted to the analyst as person—early experiences, needs, and narcissistic vulnerability. Here, she gathers and brings needed attention to the limited literature on these subjects. Part II addresses the analyst as clinician—the place of conflict, negative countertransference, enactment, and empathy, along with theoretical considerations of mirror neurons, therapeutic fit, and models of therapeutic action. In this section, she further elaborates her theoretical ideas and makes refined arguments supporting her views.
While this clean partitioning of the analyst as