Why I Became a Psychotherapist

Mentoring intersects memoir as 31 illustrious psychotherapist share the origins of their professional ambitions and, mixing authority with levity, selectively describe their professional odysseys.

• Martin A. Schulman reflects on his “deformative years” in the European Jewish culture of the Bronx.

• Sebastiano Santostefano remembers his youth in the less predictable crucible of rurarl Sicily, where his father and grandfather, functioning as village therapists, mediated family disputes. He divides his recollections into cycles of which his integrative approach to work with children is the intellectual climax.

• Jeffrey Seinfeld, who spent much of his adolescence in “special rehabilitation facilities for acting-out youth” (i.e. reform schools), regards his own psychotherapy as a form of salvation and the practice of psychotherapy as a calling.

• Martha Stark expresses the passion she sought and the engagement she found when she reconciled her strengths of heart and mind as a psychoanalyst in the title for her contribution: “If You Love Your Job, You’ll Never Work Another Day in Your Life.”

Among Joseph Reppen’s other recruits are Maria Bergmann, Morris Eagle, Althea Horner, and Ruth Lax—sources all of career counsel, professional confessional, and high-brow gossip.