The Analyst

Alexandra Minna Stern, associate dean for the humanities and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan Ann Arbor:
This eloquent, tender, and piercing portrait of a father by her daughter offers an intimate perspective on a family profoundly affected by a devastating hereditary condition and a front row seat to the fraught and kaleidoscopic history of psychotherapy across the twentieth century.

Alice Kessler-Harris, author of A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman:
Weaving the history of her family into a courageous story, Alice Wexler captures her father’s efforts to find a path through psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the years following World-War II. The result is a heart-rending tale that reveals how one family coped with personal loss in the face of dramatic cultural transformation. This is history and biography at its best.

Mari Jo Buhle, author of Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis:
As astute inquiry into both the life of her father, an accomplished Freudian psychoanalyst, and the author’s own memories, Alice Wexler’s biographical memoir is almost impossible to put down. Ceaselessly fascinating, the story offers rare insight into the mid-twentieth-century clinical practice of “talk therapy,” especially Milton Wexler’s uncommon focus on schizophrenia and his unusually close relationships with clients. With access to an amazing array of sources, including her father’s letters and her own diaries, Alice Wexler fearlessly explores his other passion, his advocacy for research into Huntington’s disease, which took his ex-wife and shaped the lives of their two potentially vulnerable daughters. A skilled biographer, Alice Wexler tells a thoroughly compelling story covering nearly a century of her father’s long and accomplished life.