A Passionate Psychoanalyst

About the Book

Ascertaining the genre of this volume has been difficult. It is much more than memoire, book of poetry, case study, dream journal, and travelogue. It is all that, plus their integration into a creative product.

It begins before the author’s birth, when enterprising Grandfather Joseph Abrahams came to America, soon to meet a mysterious death. The extended family to follow prospered, and his grandson Joseph likewise pursued the American dream, first in Texas, then New England, New York, and during the war years, much of America. In the course of a career in psychoanalysis, he ventured into study of his own inner world for understanding of his life drives. There analysis of his dreams have been central, then a bent for poetry. The result is this volume, centering about a protracted rendezvous with death, surfacing with an epic poem, entitled, A Passionate Psychoanalyst.

About the Author

Joseph Abrahams is a psychoanalyst, just ninety, who has been a follower of Freud’s way in the study of the human soul since early adolescence. Freud’s plumbing the human condition through painstaking work with troubled humans made sense to him. Analyzing their dreams to get to their core motivations made even more sense. But even earlier Abrahams found himself doing poetry, and interested in ballet and opera. Those interests went underground, in favor of science. Medicine was a compromise. Then, like Freud, he found psychiatry, and the realization that such study would have to begin with himself. Also like Freud he pursued his studies wherever they led. This volume is a preliminary report of the passionate search, based on his dreams and poems. A more formal exposition will come as An Extended Practice of Psychoanalysis. He is also hatching an opera on Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary life. He currently lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his wife, Elisabeth, a collaborator in his writing of books that stem from his career as a psychoanalyst: Turning Lives Around: Wartime Treatment of Military Prisoners, Politics from the Grassroots: A Guide to Creative Politics: The Messianic Imperative: Scourge or Savior?.