Psychoanalytic Memoirs

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.

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 country’s top 300 professors.