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All the candidates I knew agreed, when I was in training at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, that the most valuable courses were the case conferences, in which we heard word-for-word what the analyst and the patient said during sessions. Surprisingly, it is rare to find books that present such material. In When Suicide Beckons, Bhaskar Sripada provides a verbatim account, based on recordings, of select sessions from the first 15 months of a 3-year psychoanalysis he conducted with a patient called Jan (some of the early sessions took place before the recording began and were reconstructed by Sripada from his notes). The only other book (Dewald, 1972) I know of that provides similar material was published more than 50 years ago and is long out of print.
Sripada's book would be of great value if it merely presented these forty-some sessions. But the book does much more. Sripada provides an account of the thoughts he had as he conducted the sessions. He tells us about his reactions to the patient and discusses how he decides on the comments he makes. He also offers a sort of embedded memoir; he discusses his own life experiences as his interactions with the patient bring them to his mind. And there is yet something else. He describes the basic concepts of psychoanalysis and how psychoanalytic treatment works. These descriptions will not be of special interest to most readers of Psychoanalytic Psychology, but they will be useful for students starting to learn about psychoanalysis and for nonprofessionals who read the volume.
There is yet one more advantage to the book. In keeping with today's interest in how cultural backgrounds influence psychotherapists and patients, four cultures play an important role in the book. Sripada, from an Indian, Hindu background, lived in India through medical school and emigrated to the United States to do his internship and his psychiatry residency. His patient Jan, who is in his late 40s, became a medical doctor in Poland and then emi