Readings for the Psychoanalytic-Curious

Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy are experiences drawn out in terms of years – the insights and changes won are difficult to pull apart from the experience of life over these long period of time. This makes for intractable difficulties when attempting to convey the process and value of psychoanalysis. This quality can also make it difficult to commit to psychoanalysis (or any long-term psychotherapy), for fear of dedicating so much time and effort to a seemingly mysterious process.

Reading accounts of the experience of psychoanalytic therapy can help make the process more intelligible and approachable. It is common for people to seek out books about psychoanalytic therapy to help them engage more deeply with their own therapy. While so much has been written for, by, and about psychoanalysis that there is no shortage to read about psychoanalytic theory - the following books are some of my favorite books to introduce psychoanalysis to those who are curious about it.

Annie Rogers: The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma (Link at A Room of One’s Own)

Annie Rogers writes with an entirely incomparable combination of evocative and lucid language about, as the title suggests, matters that fundamentally evade language. This book draws together autobiography and case studies to create one of the clearest explications of the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan to-date. Perhaps better than any other book on this list, The Unsayable allows readers to experience the transformation of ubiquitous suffering into language with which we can reckon.

Deborah Luepnitz: Schopenhauer’s Porcupines (Link at A Room of One’s Own)

Deborah Luepnitz approaches psychotherapy through a synthesis of the seemingly antithetical works of D.W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. Schopenhauer’s Porcupines shares five “stories” of psychotherapy, each written with candor and unceasing respect for the unknown that will emerge in each case. Few, if any, authors capture the significance of the social and political world as it shows up in psychotherapy as Deborah Luepnitz does in her writings.

Ursula K. LeGuin: The Lathe of Heaven (Link at A Room of One’s Own or online through the Internet Archive)

LeGuin writes not of psychotherapy, but of the interpretation of dreams. This book explores two crucial psychoanalytic ideas in vivid prose. LeGuin creates a world in which the Freudian “dream work” of the unconscious is responsible for an ever-changing reality and how the “afterwardness” (Freud wrote of Nachträglichkeit, Lacan of apres-coup) in which dream wishes are understood intrinsically confronts grief. Few other writers capture the way in which insight can destabilize an established order of life that makes way for something heartfelt and new.

Sigmund Freud: The Question of Lay Analysis (Link at A Room of One’s Own or PDF through the Internet Archive)

The Question of Lay Analysis is a brief pamphlet written in the inimitable style of the late Freud. In it, Freud addresses the question of whether psychoanalysis should be practiced only by medical doctors. Freud argued that psychoanalysis can and should be practiced by non-medical professionals and to do so, he provides a pithy sketch of both the psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity as well as how psychoanalytic therapy works. Freud, rather notoriously, constantly revised and rethought his work, so this work is best used as an introduction rather than exhaustive summary.

Alison Bechdel: Are You My Mother? (Link at A Room of One’s Own)

Alison Bechdel is best known for her serial comic Dykes to Watch out For and earlier graphic novel Fun Home. Bechdel’s exploration of her relationship to her mother wends through her own therapies, relationships, and re-creations of the psychoanalytic works of Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan. Are You My Mother? closely follows the emotional experience of the analytic enterprise and gives readers both a sense of psychoanalytic therapy as well as the theories that inform it.