This six-part course explores psychoanalysis through memoirs written by analysands. Rather than focusing on theory alone, we read first-person accounts of analytic experience as narratives of suffering, transformation, resistance, and creativity. These texts offer a rare view “from the couch,” illuminating how psychoanalysis is lived, remembered, and narrated. Combining close reading, historical context, and group discussion, the course invites participants to think about memory, truth, transference, voice, and the ethics of telling one’s analytic story. Part book club, part study group, it is accessible to those new to psychoanalytic ideas. Readings will not be provided.

Structure of Each Class

30 min – Context & framing (historical, clinical, literary)
60 min – Guided discussion of the text
30 min – Thematic synthesis + open discussion

Class 1: Sergei Pankejeff/ “The Wolf-Man”: Memoir, Truth, and the Analytic Scene

Primary readings:
“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”
Excerpts from Muriel Gardiner’s The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud

Class 2: Madness, Language, and Cure: The Words to Say It

Analyst Bruno Bettelheim claims that Marie Cardinal’s memoir of her treatment with an unnamed Parisian analyst, The Words to Say It, “is the best account of psychoanalysis as it is seen and experienced by the patient.” Why?

Class 3: HD: Analysis and Creativity: Tribute to Freud

Freud: historical figure vs intimate presence
Reverence, idealization, and gratitude in analytic memoir.
The analyst as symbolic object
Transference after the fact: writing as a second analysis.

Class 4: Passion, Dependency, and Disillusionment

Betty Milan, Analyzed by Lacan: A Personal Account

Desire, submission, and authority in analysis
The erotics of transference
Obedience versus freedom in the analytic cure
Feminism and the couch

Class 5: Training Analysis: Psychotic Anxieties and Containment: A Personal Record of an Analysis with Winnicott

Dr. Margaret Little’s book is a rare, intimate analytic memoir that documents her long and turbulent analysis with D. W. Winnicott and uses that experience to rethink psychoanalytic technique with severely disturbed patients.

Class 6: Psychoanalysis Today: Joan K. Peters, Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis

Published in 2025, Joan K. Peters detailed account of her two analyses brings sharply into focus psychoanalysis today. But can the psychoanalytic process ever truly be captured?

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the course the participants will be able to:

1. Understand power dynamics in psychoanalysis via contrasting analytic memoir with analytic case study.
2. Know more about the limits of psychoanalysis as “cure.”
3. Appreciate more deeply concepts of transference and counter-transference, free association, conflict and defense, and the mechanisms of symptom relief through the unique sub-genre of auto-biography, the analytic memoir.

Karen Dougherty, MA, RP (CRPO), FIPA

Karen Dougherty, MA, RP (CRPO), FIPA is a Psychoanalyst and Registered Psychotherapist in private practice in Amaranth, Ontario, a writer and documentary filmmaker, and a mental health consultant for film and television. She is also a clinical supervisor who teaches at the TIP, ATPPP, the FPP, and the Extension Program of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society, of which she is also Chair. Member TPS&I.