Transforming Lives

Reviews / Votes

Schachter and his colleagues indeed make a signal contribution to the questions that have beset psychoanalysis throughout its century long history as a treatment for emotional and mental illness: What does analysis do? And how does it do it? What they incorporate into seven detailed chapter-long very lucid accounts of psychoanalyses that have gone well (conducted by seven different analysts), are reviews from most of the analysands of their perceptions of the analytic experience and its mutative impacts. The interplay is most illuminating for its concordances and its critiques-in personal, in professional, and potentially, in research terms. -- Robert S. Wallerstein, Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and Emeritus Training and Supervising Analys With the advent, first of pharmacological treatments, and then of such evidence-based approaches as cognitive-behavioral therapy, jargon-free accounts of psychoanalytic treatments have become increasingly rare. This slim volume presents 7 readable, detailed case reports including not only the perspective of 7 analysts in addition to the editor but also the patients' own accounts of the process and its outcome. It should interest both classical analysts and other psychotherapists. * The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease * This unique well-written and well-edited book offers an invaluable peek into the psychoanalyst's consulting room. If you are a practicing or training psychoanalyst or a clinician who is interested in the discipline, this book has a blessed absence of jargon and a rich offering of case material, practical methods, and insight into process. If you are a potential consumer of psychoanalytic services and with questions about your own treatment, you'll find answers here to the questions you're afraid to ask. Fulfilling its promise to open a new vista of detailed case material, including patients writing alongside their analysts about their analyses, this book has something to teach all of us. -- Polly Young-Eisendrath, University of Vermont; author of Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path