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What is the opposite of shame? I have always felt that it is self respect, rather than pride. This immensely engaging and significant book charts its contributors’ struggles to more fully assimilate their personal experience in how they work clinically. Each chapter can be read as a “coming of age” story in which a clinician faces and, eventually, embraces how our life histories shape the therapists we become. I felt as if the contributors were confiding in me, trusting me to listen empathically as they expressed their anguish, confusion, humiliation, and sorrow, as well as their moments of transcendent joy.
Perhaps some will find it odd that joy predominated as I read this book. After all, it includes reflections by Anna Ornstein (“Reflections on the Development of My Analytic Subjectivity”) on how her World War II concentration camp experiences have informed her analytic approach. Contributors opened their hearts to us, letting us hear how they have suffered physical and emotional abuse. They have allowed us entry, as they wonder how private life experience translates into overall theoretical preferences and moment-to-moment choices in sessions with patients. Each chapter called out a wide array of feelings, including intense sorrow. But while I listened to these authors tell me how it feels to be them, joy was my most frequent companion.
Of course, this speaks of me, as well as of this book. But I believe that many readers will feel joy as they witness the alchemy through which intense personal suffering transmutes into deeper compassion for oneself and others. My own joy reflects how much I identified with these writers and rooted for them. I wanted them to triumph over external and internal obstacles. In what follows, I discuss
only a few of these obstacles, since it would be impossible for me to encompass them all in the space of a review. I will focus mostly on struggles to combat shame, forge a personal/professional identity, and integrate personal experien