Wool-Gathering or How I Ended Analysis

Dan Gunn is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris where he works as a writer, teacher, reviewer, and editor. He is the author with Routledge, of a sequel to the present book, Fathering or How I Ended Analysis (Again).

‘I cannot recall enjoying a new book as much as this for a long time. It is beautifully written, immensely engaging, very funny, very informative and, by the end, moving.’Stephen Frosh, Emeritus Professor, Birkbeck College, University of London, author of How to be Real‘“The success is simple: It’s very, very funny,” the great straight man and comic says about Mel Brooks’s The Producers. Dan Gunn’s antic, penetrating autobiographical fiction, Wool-Gathering or How I Ended Analysis, is also a success, portraying the power of a sound psychoanalytic treatment by being very, very funny… In finding a language adequate to the profundity and poignancy of a good treatment’s conclusion, Gunn also offers an implicit commentary on the ponderous, unleavened quality of much psychoanalytic writing. Comedy explodes jargon. Subtle and sophisticated in its rendering of termination – that odd psychoanalytic designation – Wool-Gathering highlights, by its contrast, the insufficiencies of the psychoanalytic literature on that important, neglected subject… Psychoanalysis can learn from this funny and tough-minded book.’Ellen Pinsky in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities‘Gunn has done something that few people have ever achieved: he has written an exceptionally perceptive account of the last few weeks of his analysis in a way that is both gripping and entertaining. His narrative approach, encompassing the hilarious aspects of his daily life in Paris as well as the more associative and probing work of analysis, makes for a page-turner that at the same time explores the psychoanalytic process in provocative ways.’Bruce Fink, psychoanalyst, translator of Jacques Lacan’s Écrits‘Wool-Gathering is a beautifully crafted first-person account of the author’s life and personal analysis, belonging alongside HD’s Tribute to Freud, Sergei Pankejeff’s Wolfman by the Wolfman, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Dialogue on Love. It is unique, even among those classics, because Gunn’s analyst was Lacanian by training, making it of interest to English-speaking therapists who are increasingly curious about the brilliant and eccentric French master, whose methods remain elusive. Wool-Gathering confides a good deal about its author’s colitis, his dreams about the analyst, his problems with kissing, and his feeling of being, at times, less than human. Somehow, these disclosures never feel exhibitionistic, because of the delightful wit that runs through the work. We laugh with him at his quandaries and obsessions, as we wish we could laugh at our own.’Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Ph.D, psychoanalyst, author of Schopenhauer's Porcupines‘Dan Gunn presents himself as an expatriate Scot in his thirties who hurtles around Paris on a bicycle, dashing from teaching commitments to thrice weekly analytic sessions, and from both to feats of carnal ardour. Wool-Gathering describes the concluding stages of his analysis; and in Gunn’s hands, it becomes a merciless page-turner. No other account of an analysis approaches it. Its narrative energy is formidable, the scenes depicted sometimes hilarious, the denouement a moment of equilibrium, managed with exemplary skill.’Liam Hudson in the Times Literary Supplement‘This is an odd, tender, deeply humane, serious and funny book which celebrates the analytic experience by asking “What on earth is this all about?”’David Hewison in The Journal of Analytical Psychology

• Introduction to the Classic Edition Wool-Gathering or How I Ended Analysis