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The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives on Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity involves 12 engrossing narratives about how and why these individuals became analysts and developed their unique perspectives. These analysts represent a diverse array of people in the field with different formative backgrounds and varying emphases that distinguish their attitudes and approaches. And while readers will become interested in each person's evolution, they are also aware of how these analysts came of age and developed into maturity during a time when analysis itself was going through a sea change with the Relational Turn. This turn has involved a greater awareness of analysts' subjectivity and how they utilize this unique subjectivity in carrying out their roles and functions.
Hillman and Rosenblatt define the voice as a reflection of analysts' unique identities that they forge out of an integration of their temperaments, identifications, and particular issues as they develop. The authors really emphasize the importance of reflecting upon, and articulating one's personal narrative in evolving one's distinctive voice. Thus, they see writing these narratives as a key exercise in defining and consolidating one's professional identity. All of these contributors are writers and presenters in the field and have come to the reflective use of words in writing as a way of manifesting their particular identities. Many of these writers also emphasize the role of reading in formative development—discovering other minds and worlds that broadened their perspectives beyond their families.
Here's a sampling of the contributors and what struck us about each of their narratives: Carolyn Ellman candidly describes her personal evolution in becoming a complex thinking psychoanalyst, and she shows how her personal process paralleled and was influenced by the sea changes that was happening in the field in the 1960s and 1970s. She also shows how her analytically informed curiosity led her to make signif