Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind
“I intended to dip into Joan Peters' memoir for half an hour but couldn't stop. Page after page my admiration for Peters' bravery and generous spirit grew. Pitch-perfect and unpretentious, Untangling is a powerful testimonial for confronting rather than running from the past, however painful.”
Judith Thurman, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
“Joan Peters’ uniquely brave and luminous Untangling explains why and how analysis works — or doesn't. It took Peters a lifetime to untangle her primal knots, but she succeeded. This is a personal saga with universal wisdom to impart.”
Daniel Goldin, Editor, Psychoanalytic Inquiry
“Untangling describes the untangling of Joan's twisty past, but the book offers a second untangling as well: the untangling of the psychoanalytic process itself, told without jargon, in the ordinary but poetic language of an accomplished memoirist.”
Galit Atlas, author of Emotional Inheritance, faculty NYU Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
I loved Untangling. It is an incredible experience to read a patient’s narrative about their therapy. Joan Peters courageously pulls back the curtain on the profound, often mysterious relationship between analyst and patient. This beautifully written memoir invites readers into the intimate space of psychoanalysis, where vulnerability and longing take center stage.
Connie Lillas, Executive Director, Interdisciplinary Training Institute,
Co-author of The NeuroRelational Framework.
“This book is a true gem, a profound contribution to the mental health community and beyond. Crafted like a novel, it pulls you in, making it impossible to put down. Through its pages, you can fully immerse yourself in the healing journey that relational analysis offers. ”
Seth Aronson, Fellow, Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute, New York
“Joan Peters, in her moving page-turner of a memoir, shows how analysis embodies pentimento, 'uncovering the painting beneath the painting'. In doing so, Peters illustrates how analysis enhances and transforms one's life.”
Ilene Philipson, author of On the Shoulders of Women: The Feminization of Psychotherapy
“A Triumph! Peters’ memoir reads like a spellbinding novel – a testimony to what psychoanalysis can be. Her analyst’s afterword is thoughtful, intelligent, and daring.”
Ladys Patino, The Good Men Project
Peters is an experienced and skilled author and literature professor, and if she wanted to turn her long journey into something highbrow, she could have. But instead, she digs in with a resolve to make it real. She exposes her weaknesses and honestly chronicles her attachment to her analysts — part of the process. She insisted on telling the truth even when it’s not comfortable or easy.
She had two bouts of analysis, with two separate analysts, over a long span of her life. The work she accomplishes with the first analyst is plenty, but it doesn’t crack open the darkest secret that keeps disturbing her. She suffers from nightmares, from painful, riotous restless leg syndrome, from obsessions with her own analysts, from endless doubts in the process. But she keeps going.
Library Journal
“A memoir of psychoanalysis necessitates layers of memories. Novelist and academic Peters untangles her childhood and young adulthood through the process of psychoanalysis twice in her life. After growing up in midcentury New York with a mother who was married and widowed young, Peters faced many challenges and eventually sought analysis to address lifelong mental health issues.
She contrasts the two very different analysts with whom she works and the two processes through her different phases of life —as a young woman, she needed help working through major life transitions, while as an older woman she found that she was still unable to move beyond childhood’s scars despite a successful life. Peters is unsparingly honesty about herself, her parents, and her analysts.
The result is a compelling memoir as well as an unusually in-depth therapeutic narrative that promises the possibility of redemption from early trauma at any age. Focusing on the psychoanalytic specialty of psychotherapy, this work clarifies concepts such as transference that are particularly important to this style of therapy.
VERDICT: A stirring book that will be of interest to readers of memoirs about mental health or Jewish life, but also relevant to clinicians seeking a patient’s perspective.”
The Reluctant Psychoanalyst
Joan clearly went through a particular kind of hell in her second analysis, and there is a sense in analytic treatment that to heal we have to face demons that are difficult. She certainly did that — in her treatment, in her writing, and in her presentation. Writing about her analysis, originally suggested by her analyst, became an integral part of her healing process.
It served as a lifeline during the hardest moments, a way to conjure the analyst’s presence and continue the work of healing between sessions. The process led her to a kind of peace — to an acceptance of her mother’s limitations and a release of the desperate hope that she could have been someone different.
Garth Thomas, Hollywood Digest