This book is a moving account of the author's traumatic childhood as a survivor of a Japanese concentration camp in WW2 and of her 8-year psychoanalysis. Unique is the use of a daily journal, kept during her psychoanalysis to give detailed exploration of trauma, dissociation, and repressed rage, relived and healed through the analytic relationship. It is a tribute to a brave patient and skilled psychoanalyst and richly informative to the readers. Recommended to all who wish to understand how psychoanalysis can cure.
Judy L. Kantrowitz, PhD; training and supervising analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; author, The Role of the Analyst-Patient Match
This book is a beautifully written narrative of the authors psychoanalytic journey to integrate and make meaning of an almost-forgotten, but life-changing childhood experience. Goldsmith generously invites us to accompany her in her turbulent and transformative experience of a psychoanalytic treatment, tracked in an intimate diary. This book is an important contribution for anyone who has experienced childhood trauma or for anyone who treats the aftermath of trauma. One gets a vivid understanding of how the human mind protects itself from experiences that are too overwhelming to be understood or processed at the time they occur.
Judith A. Yanof, MD; training and supervising analyst and child supervisor, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
With its focus on the patients experience, this penetrating book corrects our professional literatures over-emphasis on the analysts perspective. Marianne Goldsmith writes a love letter to the psychoanalytic discipline, and to her own analyst, in an account honoring the complexity and richness of a treatment conducted by an expert, sensitive clinician. Here is an illuminating read for analytic therapists in training as well as for those with much experience.
Ellen Pinsky, PsyD; Faculty, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; author, Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts; co-editor, Driven to Write: Forty-five Writers on the Motives and Mysteries of their Craft
Marianne Goldsmiths traumatic war experiences and childhood abandonments, vividly described in these pages, leave her with long-lasting feelings of insecurity and self-doubt. Despite her professional success, she is haunted by her past and experience of depression and repressed rage. Journal of an Analysis is an intimate and moving account of Goldsmith's eight-year analysis in which her ancient fears, angers, sadness and hopes are relived in the transference. Through the love and expertise of her analyst and her own perseverance, she finds safety and self-knowledge. This remarkable book gives a riveting portrait of what psychoanalysis can achieve.
Daniel H. Jacobs, MD; training and supervising analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; Director, Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies, Princeton; author, Supervisory Encounter and a novel, The Distance from Home
