Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch A Memoir of Transformation: a patient examines two analyses at two stages of life with Joan Peters, PhD (Ojai, California)
"With Kristi [second analyst], it was much, much deeper. This whole dependent and infantile part of me was coming out. This is psychoanalytic language - I was moving into a regression that was terrifying, because I had been trained by my mother, and it was my nature, and it was what had worked for me to really approach things as an 'independent person' ie I don't need anybody; I don't need anything; I can function whatever happens. While I explored a little bit of that with Lane [first analyst], it was only very slight, and we never talked about it. With Kristi, she would actually make me aware of it, and I would become aware of my own need for her and withdraw. With Kristi, it was immediate that I knew there was much greater complexity going on, a level of complexity that I couldn't have handled in my 20s. And we locked horns almost immediately."
Episode Description: We begin with describing the various psychotherapy journeys that individuals undergo in search of healing. In her memoir, Joan describes two intense yet fundamentally different psychoanalyses at different points in her life. The first analysis was focused on uncovering the unrecognized story of her early family life. The second demonstrated how she was unknowingly replaying that family life in her relationship with her analyst, "I was reliving my whole childhood in our relationship." She came to recognize the "unacknowledged parts of myself" that her analyst "coaxed from its psychic den." She invites us into the frenetic 'regressive' periods where she both desperately craved the affections of her analyst and simultaneously refused to accept the care that was being offered. Multiple episodes of rupture and repair led her to come to terms with the human condition, both her own and her analysts. She closes with "As minutely as I've described these two analyses, I feel as if I've left half unsaid. And yet, as Kristi might say, it's enough."
Our Guest: Joan K. Peters, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus of Literature and Writing at California State University at California. She is the author most recently of Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis. At last year's meeting of The American Psychoanalytic Association, she gave a talk on memoir and psychoanalysis, and in the upcoming one, her book will be the subject of a panel discussion. In addition to her blog for Psychology Today, she's contributed an essay on dream interpretation for Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and is guest editing a special issue of that same journal on "The Patient Experience."
Recommended Readings:
Patient Narratives – an annotated list
The Classics
These few analysands who wrote (later on) about their analyses in the 1930's – 1950's offer brief and impressionistic overviews:
H.D.'s Tribute to Freud (New Directions, New York: 1956).
Nini Herman, My Kleinian Home: A Journey Through Four Psychotherapies (Free Association Books, London: 1988)
Margaret I. Little, Psychotic Anxieties and Containment: A Personal Record of An Analysis with Winnicott, (Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, New Jersey, London: 1985)
Contemporary Memoirs:
Marie Cardinal, The Words To Say It, in French, 1975; English, (VanVactor & Goodheart, Cambridge, Mass.: 1983), introduction by Bruno Bettelheim.
Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head: A Memoir (Other Press, New York: 2011)
Andrew Solomon's beautiful essay, "Grieving for the Therapist Who Taught Me How to Grieve," The New Yorker, May 10, 2020, is more of a tribute to his therapist than an account of the process.
Best-sellers
Solomon's The Noonday Sun: An Atlas of Depression
Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Vintage Books, New York: 1995)
Elyn R. Saks' The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (Hachette Books, New York: 2007) are records of triumph over mental illnesses more than accounts of the therapies the authors underwent.
Fuller contemporary accounts of analysis
Kim Chernin, A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and its Shadow (HarperCollins, New York City: 1995)
Kate Daniels, Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis (West Virginia University Press, Morgantown: 2022) offer severe critiques of the authors' analyses.