Training rarely prepares clinicians for what happens when their own life falls apart mid-career, including divorce, bereavement, illness, infertility, and depression. And yet they’re still expected to sit with clients’ pain each day, regardless of what’s happening in their own.
The three books here approach that gap from different angles: a research-based survey across dozens of practitioners, and two edited collections of therapists writing candidly about their own defining crises.
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The Myth of the Untroubled Therapist: Private Life, Professional Practice
Marie Adams, Routledge, 2023 (2nd ed.)
Adams interviewed forty practitioners – spanning CBT, psychoanalytic, integrative, and humanistic orientations across an international range of backgrounds – about how they coped during periods of real personal strife. She found that over half had experienced depression since entering the profession, with many continuing to practice while unwell. This books features chapters on becoming a parent (or not) while working as a therapist, working through physical pain, depression, anxiety, and the death of a family member. This second edition adds a new chapter on COVID-19’s impact on practitioners.
This is the only book on this page built on structured research across many practitioners rather than a single author’s or contributor’s own account. It’s the one to reach for if you want to know how widespread these struggles actually are, not just what one person’s experience of them looked like.
The Therapist as a Person: Life Crises, Life Choices, Life Experiences, and Their Effects on Treatment
Edited by Barbara Gerson, Routledge, 1996
This collection starts from the premise that a therapist’s subjectivity isn’t separate from the clinical work. It shapes the interaction with every patient, whether it’s acknowledged or not. Contributors write directly about the life crises the field rarely addresses in print: the death of a psychoanalyst’s own child, the failure of the therapist’s own personal therapy, a late pregnancy loss, infertility and childlessness, deciding to adopt, and parenting a profoundly deaf child. Alongside these are chapters on identity concerns tied to body size, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. Each essay works through how that specific experience concretely shaped the contributor’s clinical work afterward, rather than treating it as background biography.
This book is organized specifically around defining life crises and identity. It is the one to reach for on a specific personal circumstance a clinician is currently facing.
The Therapist at Work: Personal Factors Affecting the Analytic Process
Edited by Dimitris Anastasopoulos & Evangelos Papanicolaou, Routledge, 2004
This collection flips the usual analytic focus. Rther than centering the patient’s contribution to the therapeutic process, it centers the analyst’s own influence on it, including how a patient’s material can genuinely affect the analyst in return. Chapters cover the effect of the analyst’s own dreams on the therapeutic process, how a clinician’s personal philosophy and theoretical orientation shape the work, and intersubjective phenomena and emotional exchange between analyst and patient.
Most of these papers originated at the fourth European Federation for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Congress in 2000. It features contributions from analysts including Judy Kantrowitz, Claude Smadja, and Maria Ponsi.
Gerson’s collection above is built around specific personal crises. This one is built around theory: the analyst’s ordinary, ongoing influence on the process, not a discrete crisis or defining life event.