Psychoanalytic Memoirs

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Description

The first book-length study of the psychoanalytic memoir, this book examines key examples of the genre, including Sigmund Freuds mistitled An Autobiographical Study, Helene Deutschs Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue, Wilfred Bions War Memoirs 1917-1919, Masud Khans The Long Wait, Sophie Freuds Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, and Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yaloms A Matter of Death and Life. Offering in each chapter a brief character sketch of the memoirist, the book shows how personal writing fits into their other work, often demonstrating the continuities and discontinuities in an authors life as well as discussing each authors contributions to psychoanalysis, whether positive or negative.

Reviews

We live in the age of potted celebrity biographies. Each carefully structured to obfuscate rather than reveal. What happens in a world where emotional veracity is central and revealing it is the name of the game. In another brilliant book Jeffrey Berman reads a serious of autobiographies by major psychoanalysts, from Sigmund Freud through Wilfred Bion and Masud Khan to the Sigmunds recently deceased granddaughter Sophie Freud. Berman reveals that even in such a world, the complexity of imaging ones own life is devilishly hard work for the author, while Berman makes it easy work for the reader. A must read for all engaged in thinking about what our work reveals, like it or not, about ourselves. * Sander L. Gilman, Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, Emory University, USA *

Author Bio

Jeffrey Berman is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York, USA, where he has been teaching since 1973. He is the author or coauthor of more than 20 books, including Confidentiality and Its Discontents, coauthored with Paul Mosher, which received the 2017 Book Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association, of which he is an Honorary Member. He was selected by the Princeton Review in 2012 as one of the countrys top 300 professors.