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Jeffrey Berman's Diaries to an English Professor is, at the most superficial level, a book about a professor's and his students' experiences in a Psychoanalysis and Literature course. And, since a relatively small number of the thousands of English professors have a
great interest in psychoanalysis, I fear that Professor Berman's book may find only a limited audience. That would be a shame. Diaries to an English Professor is a book for every professor, not just those in a particular field or with a particular teaching method. The book reminds us of the great impact that reading, writing, and teaching can play in the lives of many students.
Berman has grouped the chapters in the body of his book under four topics: sins of the fathers (focusing chiefly on responses to parental divorce), eating disorders, suicide survivors, and sexual disclosures. In his Introduction Berman offers a statistical breakdown of the subjects a typical class writes on—25% on problems of being children of divorce, 17% on eating disorders, 35% on another person's or on a student's own struggles against suicide, 30% on sexual disclosure. Clearly, these topics preoccupy a remarkable number of college students. The lengthy diary entries which Berman quotes make compelling reading, but Berman's own commentary provides an important gloss on the subjects. Always a dedicated researcher, Professor Berman offers timely connections between the findings of recent psychological research and the concerns his students write about. One might suspect that a Psychoanalysis and Literature course would attract a certain type of troubled student, but Berman's documentation suggests that his students describe problems that are fairly typical.
The central theme of Diaries to an English Professor is empathy. As readers of Heinz Kohut (and Berman is such a reader) know, empathy can play a critical role in the psychoanalytic process. Berman demonstrates that the same is true of teaching. He also shows that a teacher s