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.

Looking Back is the unusual memoir of a senior figure in the international psychoanalytic community. Dr. Paul Ornstein was one of the small and distinguished group of Holocaust survivors/physicians who came to the U.S. after the second world war and became prominent in American psychoanalysis. His memoir traces his route from a small town in Hungary, to Budapest’s Neolog Rabbinical Seminary, to a Hungarian forced labor battalion, through medical school in post-war Heidelberg to the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he became a prominent professor of psychiatry and a leader of the psychoanalytic Self Psychology movement. “How does one begin to identify and evaluate a well-lived life? I thought again of this question as I read Paul Ornstein’s lovely and surprisingly profound memoir titled simply Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst. If you want to know what a life well lived looks like, read this book... Ornstein, all of his personal and professional accomplishments and contributions notwithstanding, possesses an endearing humility. Its tone colors the memoir... For entrée into a life history that spans the great events of the last century, that charts the growth and development of psychoanalysis into a humanistic and humane endeavor, and that depicts a life very well lived, I commendLooking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst.” — Joye Weisel-Barth, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology “Paul Ornstein's remarkable life has taken him from a cheder in a Hungarian town, to the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary through the Holocaust, to the summit of his psychoanalytic profession. This memoir tells this story in vivid and often moving fashion, including his dazed, postwar search for surviving family members, the tenderness of his romance and reunion with his beloved wife and collaborator Anna, their improbable postwar study of medicine among former Nazis at Heidelberg, his use of hypnosis to cure a paralyzed aide to a legendary congressman, to his development, along with Anna, into a towering figure in self-psychology. Paul, who has been fortunate to have Helen Epstein as his co-author, enriches the book by using his penetrating insight to analyze his own motivations and foibles, and those of colleagues and teachers. The reader comes away astonished by how Paul was able to transcend trauma and retain a spirited delight in living and a lifelong sense of optimism.” —Joseph Berger, veteran reporter, The New York Times and author, Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust. “In this memoir, Paul Ornstein describes his remarkable and moving personal, historical and professional life journey, losing many family members, his community, and his country in the Shoah, yet being blessed from the beginning with a resilient optimism and clear-eyed certainty about what he can accomplish and who and what matters to him: family first and foremost, friends, community and identity, and being a psychoanalyst. Looking Back, including photos and accounts of Ornstein’s close relationship with his long-lived survivor father, with Michael Balint, and with Hans Kohut, could be called ‘My Father’s Culture’. It serves as companion volume to his beloved Anna’s My Mother’s Eyes.” — Dr. Nancy J. Chodorow, Author, The Power of Feelings, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality and other works; Professor of Sociology Emerita, University of California, Berkeley; Lecturer on Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. “Paul Ornstein was one of the psychoanalysts who came to the U.S. from Europe after the second world war and became a central figure in American psychoanalysis. He and his wife Anna have made an essential contribution to establishing Heinz Kohut’s self psychology as an important part of our pluralistic psychoanalytic world. The book is a portrait of a fine psychoanalyst and a fine human being.” — Dr. Arnold Richards, Editor InternationalPsychoanalysis.net, Publisher ipbooks.net, Former editor JAPA. “It is rare for a psychoanalyst of Paul Ornstein’s generation and stature to share his personal and professional history. Dr. Ornstein’s story is unique and, fluently written with journalist Helen Epstein, provides a way for mental health professionals and lay people alike to learn how one can overcome apocalyptic trauma. Students of psychoanalytic history will get a window onto the Hungarian tradition that stretches from Ferenczi to Balint to Ornstein as well as the politics of the American psychoanalytic community, chiefly in Cincinnati and Chicago. Dr. Ornstein’s story demonstrates how determination, perseverance and love can conquer all.” — Dr. Eva Fogelman, author of Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaustand co-producer of Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust. “Looking Back is, like its author, direct, without frills, but leaves the reader thinking about some of the Big Questions. And like the story of Passover, Paul Ornstein's story is one that demands telling and retelling.” — Lester Lenoff, MSW, LCSW, Consulting Editor, Psychoanalytic Inquiry; Editorial Board, The International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. “As a survivor, Paul Ornstein is a model of resilience, turning his Shoah experience into a lesson in living. As a psychoanalyst, he was able to distance himself from ‘ego psychology’ and to acknowledge, under the influence of Kohut, the clinical importance of empathy, an evolution that had numerous equivalents in other countries, and especially in France. The result is an important book, both moving and intellectually challenging.” — Dr. Rachel Rosenblum, Paris Psychoanalytic Society, Recipient of the 2013 Hayman Award. “This memoir conveys one man's experience of the Holocaust and how he was able to reconstruct a life after the war. Uniquely, it also gives us a feel for what was a seismic event in analytic circles in the 20th century, the birth and growth of Self Psychology. From horror to empathy, not a bad journey to read about in a short, succinct book.” —Dr. Michael Rosenbluth, FRCPC Chief, Department of Psychiatry, Toronto East General Hospital, Associate Professor, University of Toronto. “This memoir is a gem, rich and deeply personal as well as a chronicle of a remarkable life lived during a remarkable time. And those photos! They are stunning.” — Dr. James Fisch, Editorial Board, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.

Psychoanalysis was her family's religion-- instead of wafers and wine, there were Seconals, Nembutals, and gin. Baptized into the faith at fourteen, Melissa Knox endured her analyst's praise of her childlike, victimized mother -- who leaned too close, ate off Melissa's plate, and thought "pedophile" meant "silly person." Gaslighted with the notions that she'd seduced her father, failed to masturbate, and betrayed her mother, Melissa shouldered the blame. Her story of a family pulled into and torn apart by psychoanalysis exposes the abuse inherent in its authoritarianism as Melissa learns, with a startling sense of humor and admirable chagrin, that divorcing Mom is sometimes the least crazy thing to do.

Winner of the 2021 ABAPsa Book Prize Award! What would the story of analysis look like if it were told through the eyes of the analysand? How would the patient write and present the analytic experience? How would the narrative as written by the analysand differ from the analytic narrative commonly offered by the analyst? What do the actual analytic narratives written by Freud’s patients look like? This book aims to confront these intriguing questions with an innovative reading of memoirs by Freud’s patients. These patients—including Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man; the poet H. D.; and the American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner—all came to Vienna specially to meet Freud and embark with him on the intimate and thrilling journey of deciphering the unconscious and unravelling the secrets of the psyche. A broad psychoanalytic and literary-historical reading of their memoirs is offered in this new entry to the popular Routledge History of Psychoanalysis Series, with the purpose of presenting the analysands' narratives as they themselves recounted them. This makes it possible to re-examine the links among psychoanalysis, literature, and translation and sheds new light on the complex challenge of coming to know oneself through the encounter with otherness. This book is unique in its focus on multiple memoirs by patients of Freud and presents a fresh, even startling, close-up look at psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and as a rigorous discourse and offers a new vision of Freud’s strengths and, at times, defects. It will be of considerable interest to scholars of psychoanalysis and intellectual history, as well as those with a wider interest in literature and memoir.

Looking Back is the unusual memoir of a senior figure in the international psychoanalytic community. Dr. Paul Ornstein was one of the small and distinguished group of Holocaust survivors/physicians who came to the U.S. after the second world war and became prominent in American psychoanalysis. His memoir traces his route from a small town in Hungary, to Budapest's Neolog Rabbinical Seminary, to a Hungarian forced labor battalion, through medical school in post-war Heidelberg to the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he became a prominent professor of psychiatry and a leader of the psychoanalytic Self Psychology movement.

Paperback version. The first section consists of the entire text of the diaries which Bion wrote as a young man to record his experiences on the Western Front, including his photographs and diagrams. The second section comprises two essays in which he reflects on his war time experiences.

This book examines the importance and continued relevance of A Memoir of the Future in understanding and applying Bion’s work to contemporary psychoanalysis. Bion continued to innovate throughout his life, but the Memoir has been largely overlooked. Focusing on A Memoir of the Future is not only of deep interest in terms of the author’s biography, or even only in function of a better understanding of his theoretical concepts, but can also be considered, for all intents and purposes, the final chapter of an ingenious creative enterprise While by some it was thought as the evidence of Bion’s presumed senility, this book challenges that perspective, arguing that it represents the last challenge he issued to the psychoanalytic Establishment. In each chapter, the authors explore this notion that A Memoir forms an essential part of Bion’s theory, and that in it he establishes a new ‘aesthetic’ psychoanalytic paradigm. With an international list of distinguished authors, this is a key book for any analysts interested in a comprehensive understanding of Bion’s work.