Learning from Life: Becoming a Psychoanalyst (review)

"I am who I am, and my analytic work is what it has been. I stand by both" (2). Patrick Casement's deceptively simple introductory words reflect the tone of the autobiographical reflections contained in this volume: forthright, independent-minded, and unapologetic. Those of us who still search to find such a confident voice will be particularly engaged by the ensuing personal disclosures that candidly demonstrate how such states of self-possession can be born of ongoing encounters with our inevitable vulnerabilities, struggles, and uncertainties. Casement relates experiences from his life, often in poignant detail, in order to illustrate how profoundly they have influenced his clinical work and theoretical leanings. While the subjectivity of theoretical orientation is now a widely accepted idea in contemporary psychoanalysis, the risks of personal exposure can still be an unfortunate deterrent to an explicit discussion of how we each arrive at our particular ways of working and thinking.

Casement engages this dilemma in a thoughtful manner, sharing his concerns about how the book (written after his retirement from clinical practice) might "contaminate" the transference and acknowledging the potential for colleagues to engage in "wild analysis" and speculation about him. In taking these risks, he crafts historical bits of himself and his clinical work into a compelling demonstration of the psychoanalytic ideas he promotes. Herein lies the value and underlying thesis of the book. It is one thing merely to discuss the vulnerability that a clinician will need to bear in the course of good analytic work and quite another to show it to us—through the writing of a self-revealing book. As he aptly explains, "All of life can prove to be a resource for our learning" (1).

Why does this matter? According to Casement, the essence of the analytic venture is "learning from" the patient. While he details the complexity of this process elsewhere (Casement 1991), here he takes the additional step of sharing the personal experiences that were foundational in shaping his views. Thanks to this relatively rare level of transparency, his clinical recommendations transcend received wisdom and become examples of how we may reach our individual understandings of the analytic process. For seasoned clinicians as well as beginning therapists, this book implicitly invites us to reexamine our own ideas and their inherently subjective roots. With abundant examples from both clinical and personal life, Casement reminds us and shows us why it is important for the analyst to be free to resonate with a wide range of emotion and experience. "If we are too attached to our own experience, we are liable to read our patients in ways that fit in with this. At the same time we are likely to be missing other ways of understanding, which may go beyond what we have so far experienced" (153).

Casement further explains how his personal struggles around conformity became a shaping force in his professional life, leading him to discover a strong kinship with the work of Donald Winnicott. A symbolic childhood memory in which Casement's developing "capacity for concern" was foreclosed by a parental demand for apology appears as a cornerstone for the many ways in which Winnicott's ideas about the "true self" would come to resonate with Casement's experiences at intimate levels:

I had experienced many pressures to become like other people. As well as being often rebellious I had also tried conforming. But I had never completely lost touch with the rebel in myself, which had helped me not to get totally lost in compliance. In the course of this journey I had begun to find my own voice. I had also found that I was strongly attracted to an open-minded approach to life, sensing and coming to value the otherness of the other, rather than still being caught into the constricting world of "received truth" and dogma.

(45)

Many of the examples in this volume could serve as effective applications of Winnicottian ideas (e.g., the potentially creative aspects of destructiveness, the antisocial...