Transforming Lives

Joseph Schachter was trained as a clinical psychologist in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University, obtained his medical degree from New York University-Bellevue Medical School, and received his psychoanalytic training at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. In mid-career he spent a number of years in full-time physiological/developmental research with infants and children. He subsequently returned to psychoanalytic practice and was a training and supervising analyst at the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Institute. Recently retired, Dr. Schachter now resides in New York City.

Schachter and his colleagues indeed make a signal contribution to the questions that have beset psychoanalysis throughout its century long history as a treatment for emotional and mental illness: What does analysis do? And how does it do it? What they incorporate into seven detailed chapter-long very lucid accounts of psychoanalyses that have gone well (conducted by seven different analysts), are reviews from most of the analysands of their perceptions of the analytic experience and its mutative impacts. The interplay is most illuminating for its concordances and its critiques-in personal, in professional, and potentially, in research terms.

• Chapter 1 An Early Psychoanalytic Success - Freud's Treatment of the "Rat Man"Chapter 2 George: Transformation Viewed from a Thirty-year Follow-upChapter 3 Laila: Treatment of a Patient with a Serious Chronic DiseaseChapter 4 Watt: A Case of Sexual (Dis-)OrientationChapter 5 Caroline: "The Same But Forever Changed"Chapter 6 Sarah: "This Aplysia ... makes me sick to my stomach"Chapter 7 Jacob: Climbing Out of the DungeonChapter 8 Andrew: Inferiority, Social Anxiety and SubmissivenessChapter 9 Strengthening Analysis, Protecting PatientsChapter 10 Discussion and Conclusion - Seven Analyses