Providing a detailed account of her own experience with the psychoanalytic process, the author of The Obsession and The Hungry Self explains how she worked through and came to terms with her emotional life. National ad/promo. Tour.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A California psychoanalyst closely examines her 25-year experience as an analysand with three different analysts, each of whom she credits with distinct, if limited, strengths. As a young mother, Chernin (The Hungry Self) began her first analysis with a distinguished male analyst in San Francisco. After discovering new strength of self, she was shaken by a renewed sense of uncertainty and moved abruptly to Israel. Back on the West Coast years later and studying for a degree in clinical psychology, she entered her second analysis, this time with a woman. After claiming her bisexuality, Chernin ended that effort with a sudden move to New England. The third analyst, once again in California, was another man, with whom Chernin discussed her own analytic cases and theories. A lengthy disagreement with him over the role of analyst (Chernin's stance is that the analyst is a listener who facilitates the analysand's narrating of his/her own life story) led to the end of that collaboration. Of interest mainly to analysts and analysands, Chernin's chronicle is eloquent, specific and, perhaps appropriately, self-absorbed.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Memories of 25 years on the couch make for a curiously compelling recounting of the rewards and shortcomings of psychoanalysis. Chernin (Crossing the Border, 1994, etc.), herself a psychoanalyst, dives into recollections of time spent with three analysts over a quarter of a century. Using traditional analytic tools--primarily association--she recalls to life the passionate young woman in Vienna who sought intellectual and sexual adventure; the fragmented, newly divorced young mother in California who found in her first analyst a target of devotion; the emerging adult who found a life's work and a credo of bisexuality with her second analyst, and the mature woman who broke with classical ``interpretive'' psychoanalysis through her third analyst. All of these rewarding if drawn-out probes are tracked by a shadow self that has ``descended, as if in a diving bell, to uncharted regions.'' It is not Chernin's theories, but her ability to lead the reader into that ``teeming, fecund inner world,'' which rarely surfaced in the analysts' offices, that make this book appealing. With the help of yet another analyst who monitors her clinical work, she comes to believe that analysis is not the science of mining the psyche, but the art of storytelling. The ``patient'' molds a unique story for the ``doctor'' to appreciate without fitting either the tale or the telling into an established framework. Whether about infants as bisexual beings or adults as their own best storytelling analysts, Chernin's sudden ``insights'' echo ideas that have been chewed over since Freud (and long before, if you count mythology). Still, she pleads for respect, citing those insights as hers for the moment, invested with the ``aha'' of personal discovery--like a child who finally understands that c-a-t is more than squiggly lines. Despite her angry critique of traditional psychoanalysis, Freud remains a hero and psychoanalysis has ``a lasting place among the major achievements of our culture.'' There are echos of Erica Jong in this book's naive self- absorption, but Chernin's hard-core fans will find it rich with discovery. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
fascinating book,
By
This review is from: A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow (Hardcover)
I do love this book. I recommend it for mental health professionals, mental health professionals in training, and for individuals who have been committed to their own counseling, psychotherapy, or psychoanalysis, past or present.
Chernin relates her own experiences with psychoanalysis--a stunning 25 years--with candor, eloquence, and yearning. She openly acknowledges the ways in which she needed to grow, the ways in which psychoanalysis was able to help her, and the ways in which psychoanalysis eluded her. Because psychoanalysis is a consuming enterprise, many choose to undertake it for brief periods of time; Chernin is admiringly frank about how consuming psychoanalysis can be, and the toll it had on her personal relationships at times. Having devoted 25 years of her life to psychoanalysis, Chernin is uniquely qualified to talk about its benefits and limitations in depth. Again, I do love this book. I love the yearning and devotion with which she lived her life, and the way in which she describes figuring out different things about herself (e.g., she realized that when she was angry at another person and felt compelled to eat, that the eating was an act of aggression that she took out on herself). She writes frankly about her love for her therapists, and the way she still misses the first one years later. The writing is beautiful--she describes fascinating dreams that she has of arriving too late for her therapy appointments, she reflects that possibly a stitch could be dropped in the self's early knitting that makes it impossible to heal no matter how dense the analytic texture. I found it inspiring to read that every year she was a more coherent self, more able to produce a body of writing and to have deeper relationships. I do love this book. I recommend it very highly.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Me, me, me -- and my doctors,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow (Paperback)
Psychoanalysis is indisputably a worthy subject -- academically, personally -- but in this disappointing foray Chernin is so self-absorbed that it's annoying. It's more a diary than anything else. Chernin has said it all before, and so this book is not very interesting or illuminating.
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