Fighting for Love: Journal of a Training Analysis
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : September 2025
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 233
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98161
- ISBN 13 : 9781032960814
- ISBN 10 : 1032960817
Free UK Delivery over £25
There are currently no reviews
Be the first to review
Fighting for Love: Journal of a Training Analysis is a unique account of an eight-year psychoanalysis, journaled and retrospectively annotated from the patient’s perspective in the aftermath of an unexpected and frightening dissociation. This book tells the story of that analysis in two parts.
Part One, The Awakening, places the analysis in its dynamic and historical context and sets the stage for the analysis. A survivor of a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia in WWII, parental loss and recurrent abandonments as a child, it takes the reader deep into the pain and traumas the author repressed and dissociated and incorporates important components of the analysis, such as its ‘signal dream’, within the narrative. Part Two, The Analysis, is an edited version of Goldsmith’s original journal with retrospective and expository comments inserted, documenting the evolution of the transference and the relationship with her analyst. With the help and love of her analyst, the author was able to find the words she did not have as a child and feel the feelings she could not feel before.
This book will resonate with anyone who has experienced trauma and offers insight to those who treat its aftermath. Psychoanalytic professionals in practice and training, including psychotherapists and counselors, will find this book compelling, as will readers interested in the psychoanalytic process.
Reviews and Endorsements
This book is a moving account of the author's traumatic childhood as a survivor of a Japanese concentration camp in WW2 and of her 8-year psychoanalysis. Unique is the use of a daily journal, kept during her psychoanalysis to give detailed exploration of trauma, dissociation, and repressed rage, relived and healed through the analytic relationship. It is a tribute to a brave patient and skilled psychoanalyst and richly informative to the readers. Recommended to all who wish to understand how psychoanalysis can cure.
Judy L. Kantrowitz, PhD; training and supervising analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; author, The Role of the Analyst-Patient Match
This book is a beautifully written narrative of the author’s psychoanalytic journey to integrate and make meaning of an almost-forgotten, but lifechanging childhood experience. Goldsmith generously invites us to accompany her in her turbulent and transformative experience of a psychoanalytic treatment, tracked in an intimate diary. This book is an important contribution for anyone who has experienced childhood trauma or for anyone who treats the aftermath of trauma. One gets a vivid understanding of how the human mind protects itself from experiences that are too overwhelming to be understood or processed at the time they occur.
Judith A. Yanof, MD; training and supervising analyst and child supervisor, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
With its focus on the patient’s experience, this penetrating book corrects our professional literature’s over-emphasis on the analyst’s perspective. Marianne Goldsmith writes a love letter to the psychoanalytic discipline, and to her own analyst, in an account honoring the complexity and richness of a treatment conducted by an expert, sensitive clinician. Here is an illuminating read for analytic therapists in training as well as for those with much experience.
Ellen Pinsky, PsyD; Faculty, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; author, Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts; co-editor, Driven to Write: Forty-five Writers on the Motives and Mysteries of their Craft
Marianne Goldsmith’s traumatic war experiences and childhood abandonments, vividly described in these pages, leave her with long-lasting feelings of insecurity and self-doubt. Despite her professional success, she is haunted by her past and experience of depression and repressed rage. Journal of an Analysis is an intimate and moving account of Goldsmith's eight-year analysis in which her ancient fears, angers, sadness and hopes are relived in the transference. Through the love and expertise of her analyst and her own perseverance, she finds safety and self-knowledge. This remarkable book gives a riveting portrait of what psychoanalysis can achieve.
Daniel H. Jacobs, MD; training and supervising analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; Director, Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies, Princeton; author, Supervisory Encounter and a novel, The Distance from Home
Table of Contents
Part 1 - The Awakening
1. A Transformative Event
2. A Letter from My Father
3. The Dream of '42
4. The Aftermath
5. From Psychotherapy to Psychoanalysis
6. The Search
7. The Journal
8. Our First Hour
9. The Kempetai
10. Our Life Before
11. The Three of Us
12. Tjideng
13. Reunion
14. The Sea Hydra
15. Carmel
16. Apeldoorn
17. Wassenaar
18. The Deer Dream
19. The Loss of Our Connection
Part 2 - The Analysis
20. The Narrative
21. The Therapeutic Alliance
22. The Working Through
23. Termination
About the Author(s)
Marianne Lovink Goldsmith is board certified in pediatrics and psychiatry, and is a retired psychoanalyst. She is based in Massachusetts, USA.
Customer Reviews
Our customers have not yet reviewed this title. Be the first add your own review for this title.
You may also like
Arminda Aberastury’s Theory and Technique of Child Analysis
Jill Savege Scharff
Price £27.99
save £7.00
Linking Objects and Linking Phenomena: A Study of the Forms, Symptoms,...
Vamik D. Volkan
Price £27.99
save £7.00