Description
Book SynopsisThe Analyst is an intimate and searching portrait of Milton Wexler, written by his daughter, an acclaimed historian. Alice Wexler illuminates her father’s intense private life and explores how his life and work illuminate the broader reaches of Freudian ideas in the United States.
Trade ReviewAn astute inquiry into both the life of her father, an accomplished Freudian psychoanalyst, and the author’s own memories, Alice Wexler’s biographical memoir is almost impossible to put down. Ceaselessly fascinating, the story offers rare insight into the mid-twentieth-century clinical practice of “talk therapy,” especially Milton Wexler’s uncommon focus on schizophrenia and his unusually close relationships with clients. With access to an amazing array of sources, including her father’s letters and her own diaries, Alice Wexler fearlessly explores his other passion, his advocacy for research into Huntington’s disease, which took his ex-wife and shaped the lives of their two potentially vulnerable daughters. A skilled biographer, Alice Wexler tells a thoroughly compelling story covering nearly a century of her father’s long and accomplished life. -- Mari Jo Buhle, author of
Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with PsychoanalysisIn this memoir of her father, one of LA’s most prominent analysts, the historian Alice Wexler gives us a revealing and vivid portrait of a time when psychotherapy loomed large in America. Poignant, engrossing, and very smart! -- Alice Echols, author of
Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975Weaving the history of her family into a courageous story, Alice Wexler captures her father’s efforts to find a path through psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the years following World War II. The result is a heart-rending tale that reveals how one family coped with personal loss in the face of dramatic cultural transformation. This is history and biography at its best. -- Alice Kessler-Harris, author of
A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian HellmanThis eloquent, tender, and piercing portrait of a father by his daughter offers an intimate perspective on a family profoundly affected by a devastating hereditary condition and a front-row seat to the fraught and kaleidoscopic history of psychotherapy across the twentieth century. -- Alexandra Minna Stern, associate dean for the humanities and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
A probing biography of her father, psychoanalyst Milton Wexler… Wexler’s keen reflections make for a powerful portrait. Readers interested in the history of psychoanalysis will want to check this out. * Publishers Weekly *
Table of ContentsPrologue
1. On the Road to Topeka
2. Out of Brooklyn
3. Becoming Freudian
4. The Slap, Explained
5. Ex-Topekan
6. Losing the Road Map
7. Freudian Fathers and (Proto-) Feminist Daughters
8. Revelations
9. The Big Freedom
10. (A) Challenging Fate
11. Workshops of the Possible
12. Making Friends, Making Love
13. Retelling Lives
14. Life Underwater
15. The Old Leaf
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Sayings of Milton Wexler
Published Papers and Reviews by Milton Wexler
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
