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Jeffrey Berman's Diaries to an English Professor is a totally unique book. I know of no equivalent study in either literary, pedagogical, or psychoanalytic literature. Never before has there been an attempt to track as extensively over time the self-representations of students writing within a classroom situation informed by a psychoanalytic method. Berman, Professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany, has undertaken a true tour-de-force. The book records, with the students' acquiescence, the change in student self-representation in the self-reflective diaries that Berman encourages his English-literature students to keep as part of his ongoing class on literature and psychoanalysis. More than a decade of material is digested in this book, which shows a rich and deep understanding of the relationship between historical change and underlying constitutional and psychological structures.
Berman has four themes at the center of his work: the study of relationship to dissolving parental authority, eating and its disorders, suicide, and sexuality. These are central topics for the age group (between eighteen and twenty-two) that Berman is examining, and they are concepts that undergo a substantial shift in importance and emphasis during the 1980s and early 1990s. Berman's book enables the reader to examine how these topics are internalized as the public discourse about the nuclear family, anorexia, student suicide, and sexuality in the age of AIDS come to be front-page (or at least primetime) concerns of American culture.
Berman's approach is that of a teacher of literature rather than that of a sociologist or psychologist. He deals with texts, with the diaries that his students prepare as a classroom assignment. Yet he makes the point early on that the diary entries seem to be better written than the actual compositions the students write. I find this revealing. It does seem that when topics are addressed that are meaningful for students, their engagem