Customer Reviews

A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow

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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.

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.