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One of the very few accounts of a psychoanalytic treatment written by the patient is Joanne Greenberg's 1964 semi-autobiographical novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. It recounts the patient's memory of a treatment with Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. That treatment took place in a mental hospital and involved putting the patient on her analyst's lap where she was fed milk with a baby bottle. Despite this and other interventions that most analysts would not use, the patient believed that she had attained self-knowledge, the capacity to form loving relationships, and a successful writing career.
In Becoming the Person I Was Meant to Be: A Memoir of a Patient's Successful Psychoanalysis, Mishkin recounts her own analysis as an outpatient, communicating her own feelings in words and sometimes sitting across from her analyst, sometimes lying down with him sitting behind her. She was much less compromised than someone who would need hospitalization or ongoing medication, but was intensely unhappy when she sought treatment. By her own account, her analysis led her to experience joy in everyday living, a life of caring for others, especially children, and an appreciation of her own strengths and capacities. Judging from this book, it also gave her two very successful occupations; she became an occupational therapist and a brave, strong, clear writer.
Another adolescent patient defined psychoanalytic therapy as: “Lay, say, and pay.” Sounds easy. But not so fast. This treatment took 40 years, lots of pain, and lots of learning. During those years she went from being anorexic, bulimic, masochistic, self-harming, and sadistic to becoming someone who enjoys herself, helps others to do the same, and uses her empathy to achieve deep understanding of the people she cares about and cares for.
Her capacity for gratitude for the treatment she received shines throughout, from the dedication to her grandmother and her analyst, to the way she uses humor to deal with her own and other peo