Steven Kuchuck is a faculty member, supervisor, and is on the Board of Directors at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. He is a practicing psychoanalyst in Manhattan, New York. He is also co-editor of the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives and Associate Editor of the Relational Perspectives Book Series published by Routledge.

2015 Gradiva Award Winner

Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst's Life Experience explores how leaders in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy address the phenomena of the psychoanalyst's personal life and psychology. In this edited book, each author describes pivotal childhood and adult life events and crises that have contributed to personality formation, personal and professional functioning, choices of theoretical positions, and clinical technique.

By expanding psychoanalytic study beyond clinical theory and technique to include a more careful examination of the psychoanalyst's life events and other subjective phenomena, readers will have an opportunity to focus on specific ways in which these events and crises affect the tenor of the therapist's presence in the consulting room, and how these occurrences affect clinical choices. Chapters cover a broad range of topics including illness, adoption, sexual identity and experience, trauma, surviving the death of one's own analyst, working during 9/11, cross cultural issues, growing up in a communist household, and other family dynamics.

Throughout, Steven Kuchuck (ed) shows how contemporary psychoanalysis teaches that it is only by acknowledging the therapist's life experience and resulting psychological makeup that analysts can be most effective in helping their patients. However, to date, few articles and fewer books have been entirely devoted to this topic. Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst's Life Experience forges new ground in exploring these under-researched areas. It will be essential reading for practicing psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, those working in other mental health fields and graduate students alike.

Kuchuck, Introduction. Part I: Early Life Events, Crises, and Influences. Bjorklund, How Betty and Vincent Became Sally and Scott. Orbach. I Wanted the Stuff of Secrets to Be in the Light. Atlas, Sex, Lies and Psychoanalysis. Slochower. The Professional Idiom and the Psychoanalytic Other. Hirsch. Emerging from the Oppositional and the Negative. Frank. Out from Hiding. Ornstein, Reflections on the Development of My Analytic Subjectivity. Ullman,The Personal Is Political, the Political Is Personal: On the Subjectivity of an Israeli Psychoanalyst. Sherman, Sweet Dreams Are Made of These: Or, How I Came Out and Came into My Own. Part II: Later Life Events, Crises, and Developmental Passages. Eigen, Moments That Count. Kuchuck, Guess Who's Going to Dinner? On the Arrival of the Uninvited Third. Ringstrom, Becoming an Analyst: At Play in Three Acts. Glassman, Botticelli, Perspectives on Gay Fatherhood: Emotional Legacies and Clinical Reverberations. Grill, The Importance of Fathers. Mendelsohn, Working Through Separation: Personal and Clinical Reflections. Zindel, A Bird That Thunders: An Analysis with Emmanuel Ghent. Pines, Stroke and the Fracturing of the Self: Rebuilding a Life and a Practice. Bergmann, Psychoanalysis in Old Age: the Patient and the Analyst