Danièle Brun, a psychoanalyst and a member of ‘Espace analytique’, is a professor emerita at the University of Paris-Diderot, where, in 2001, she founded the research centre Psychoanalysis, Medicine and Society. She is the president of the firm ‘Médecine et psychanalyse’ and the author of La Passion dans l’amitié and Mères majuscules, which were published by Editions Odile Jacob.

The psychoanalyst is not a disembodied being who can shut out her own worries and sorrows when she receives patients. What her patients tell her about their lives informs her own life, nurturing and modifying it.
Sincerely, and drawing on painful events in her own life, Danièle Brun shows how patients’ everyday lives interact with the analyst’s and how patients’ family histories may connect with the analyst’s.
An important part of the psychoanalytic cure is played out in the interconnections between the lives of psychoanalysts and their patients. And this is something that is too often neglected.

• An issue rarely dealt with by psychoanalysts: that of the interaction between the analyst’s life and the patients’.
• An important factor that complements Freud’s concept of transference.
• A stimulating argument in favour of a more ‘concrete’, less theoretical and more accessible form of psychoanalysis.
• This is a compelling narrative rather than a theoretical work.