Sandra Cruz, SA Examiner
If you’ve ever wondered what actually happens during psychoanalysis — or what it feels like to unravel years of emotional knots on a therapist’s couch — Joan Peters‘ “Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis” offers a rare, intimate glimpse into that world.
Unlike most writing on psychoanalysis, which often comes from the perspective of clinicians, “Untangling” is told from the inside out. Peters chronicles her decades-long analytic journey with striking vulnerability, courage, and clarity. This journey consisted of two different analysts: Lane when she was 28 and Kristi when she was 67. While Lane was helpful, she remained impersonal and impartial. Kristi actually got to know her because she used relational psychoanalysis, a psychoanalytic approach that emphasizes the importance of the relationship between the therapist and patient in the therapeutic process. Peters brings readers into the room with her, detailing the subtle shifts, long silences, and emotionally charged breakthroughs that define the therapeutic process.
Ladys Patino, The Good Men Project
Peters is an experienced and skilled author and literature professor, and if she wanted to turn her long journey into something highbrow, she could have. But instead, she digs in with a resolve to make it real. She exposes her weaknesses and honestly chronicles her attachment to her analysts — part of the process. She insisted on telling the truth even when it’s not comfortable or easy.
She had two bouts of analysis, with two separate analysts, over a long span of her life. The work she accomplishes with the first analyst is plenty, but it doesn’t crack open the darkest secret that keeps disturbing her. She suffers from nightmares, from painful, riotous restless leg syndrome, from obsessions with her own analysts, from endless doubts in the process. But she keeps going.
Library Journal
“A memoir of psychoanalysis necessitates layers of memories. Novelist and academic Peters untangles her childhood and young adulthood through the process of psychoanalysis twice in her life. After growing up in midcentury New York with a mother who was married and widowed young, Peters faced many challenges and eventually sought analysis to address lifelong mental health issues.
She contrasts the two very different analysts with whom she works and the two processes through her different phases of life —as a young woman, she needed help working through major life transitions, while as an older woman she found that she was still unable to move beyond childhood’s scars despite a successful life. Peters is unsparingly honesty about herself, her parents, and her analysts.
The result is a compelling memoir as well as an unusually in-depth therapeutic narrative that promises the possibility of redemption from early trauma at any age. Focusing on the psychoanalytic specialty of psychotherapy, this work clarifies concepts such as transference that are particularly important to this style of therapy.
VERDICT: A stirring book that will be of interest to readers of memoirs about mental health or Jewish life, but also relevant to clinicians seeking a patient’s perspective.”
The Reluctant Psychoanalyst
Joan clearly went through a particular kind of hell in her second analysis, and there is a sense in analytic treatment that to heal we have to face demons that are difficult. She certainly did that — in her treatment, in her writing, and in her presentation. Writing about her analysis, originally suggested by her analyst, became an integral part of her healing process.
It served as a lifeline during the hardest moments, a way to conjure the analyst’s presence and continue the work of healing between sessions. The process led her to a kind of peace — to an acceptance of her mother’s limitations and a release of the desperate hope that she could have been someone different.
Garth Thomas, Hollywood Digest