1. What is “Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis” about?
Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis, describes what it feels like to go through a decade-long analysis, how it works and works on you, drawing you into intimacy, wild transferences and reliving of traumatic experiences on the way to a cure. I wrote it to celebrate my analyst’s skill in freeing me from lifelong anxiety and depression that didn’t make sense in my truly good life. As I wrote, I discovered a kind of mission in letting readers know what I learned about the psyche that might help them as well, whether they are in therapy or not.
2. Can you talk about your therapeutic journey, the obstacles you faced, and changes you went through?
I went into psychoanalysis at age 27 because of a recurrent nightmare that woke me screaming several times a week. My lover, tired of being woken up, asked me to find a therapist, saying “Something’s scaring you and you’re scaring me.” A newly-minted psychoanalyst with a touch of Sherlock Holmes helped me to investigate a childhood filled with secrets and mystery. Together, we used the information from interviews with relatives to tease out the nightmare’s meaning and the source of my terror. With her support, I was able to build a fulfilling life with both the right partner and job for me, but I still faced high anxiety and deep depressions.
A second psychoanalysis revealed why. This time the cure came about in working out my difficulties relating to my analyst — like my distrust of strangers, my distancing defenses, my need to control the analysis, all of which vanished as I gradually warmed to the caring attention that this person in authority trained on me, session after session. That tapped into the childhood longing for exactly what she offered — something like a new good parent who knows better than you what you feel, and can safely contain those unrecognized and frightening needs; a responsible adult who would finally take some responsibility for what had gone terribly wrong in my early years.
3. What advice would you have for someone who has been struggling with different kinds of therapy but hasn’t experienced understanding and breakthroughs?
In my experience, finding the right therapist is the key to getting the right help. I “shopped” for a therapist, studying Psychology Today’s “Find A Therapist” listings until I could identify several good candidates. I talked to them by phone first, then interviewed the three I liked best, asking them pointedly if they could give me what I thought I needed. In both my therapy experiences, I chose people with whom I sensed a mutual connection (despite cultural differences in one case), who seemed to get me, and who I liked. That’s a start.
If you find you aren’t getting what you hoped for, I believe you have to ask for it and deal with the tensions — even anger — that might arise when you do, examining those and your own responses to them. My criticism of my analyst turned out to be more about my own difficulties than about her inadequacies, but I always felt I was getting enough from her to keep coming back. If you’re not, it may be time for a change.
4. You write about how you forged a close relationship with your psychoanalysts and how that changed over time as your realizations about yourself evolved. Is that something others should expect and how does it help them to heal?
The whole of a patient’s life is believed by many psychoanalysts today to be contained in their relationship with their analyst — what your assumptions are about them, how you position yourself, what about them you value and what you distrust or dislike, and how well you can form a healthy intimacy. Another way of saying it is your “transference” towards them — what you project onto them from your own history. I projected my mother’s “inadequate care” onto my analyst. It took me two years to discover how remote I was with my analyst, in reality defending myself against rejection or disappointment with my own controlling and judgmental response to her.
It was after I crashed several times — I once literally crashed my car just as I arrived for an appointment — and felt both her genuine care and the support of her deft interpretations that unbeknownst to me, my trust in her grew. But it grew into such full-blown dependency that I panicked when she had to be away for a week or she wasn’t perfectly attuned to me. I trusted her enough to acknowledge and examine that long-buried dependency. Understanding it was healing allowed me a far greater closeness with her as well as others.
5. How can someone face the trauma and pain in their past when it’s deeply buried within — without feeling unsafe or unprotected during the process?
That’s just it. The right analyst will balance being supportive with being challenging. They’ll go at a tolerable pace. You might have moments of fear but should feel an overall safety with this person. Isolation was my issue, not that I understood it. My analyst, recognizing my fundamental insecurity and distrust of others, “chipped away” at it, as she said — with her patience, her understanding of my periodic rejections of her, and the interpretations that led to my breakthroughs. 
My mother was tough. She didn’t coddle children and rarely doled out affection. By word and deed, she taught me never to depend on anyone and not to need people. But I did need them, of course, and because that need got buried and felt shameful to me, it got relegated to my unconscious, where it grew desperate and distorted. Once my analyst drew it out, I came face to face with myself as a child emotionally on her own with traumatic loss. But I wasn’t on my own with it all any more. I had an analyst to guide me through.
6. Where can we find you online?
Find me online at untanglingjoan.com
