The first book-length study of the psychoanalytic memoir, this book examines key examples of the genre, including Sigmund Freud's mistitled An Autobiographical Study, Helene Deutsch's Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue, Wilfred Bion's War Memoirs 1917-1919, Masud Khan's The Long Wait, Sophie Freud's Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, and Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom's 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 author's life as well as discussing each author's contributions to psychoanalysis, whether positive or negative.
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 Sigmund's recently deceased granddaughter Sophie Freud. Berman reveals that even in such a world, the complexity of imaging one's 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.
