This compelling memoir by psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Fern W. Cohen invites readers to gain a greater understanding of the  complex connections between our present and our past and the often misunderstood process of psychoanalysis. Cohen’s remarkable capacity to recount her life from both subjective and objective points of view animates her journey toward self-discovery in such a way that it touches our hearts as well as our minds. 
 
         Along the way, we meet the six-year-old for whom tennis meant a rare opportunity to spend time with a distant father, the Radcliffe sophomore in crisis to whom falling apart was the best thing that ever happened because it introduced her to the universe of the unconscious, and the woman who found her self in that universe, on both sides of the couch. 

       Above and beyond the particulars of her own history, Cohen conveys, in everyday language, the nature of unconscious mind, the process of psychoanalysis, and the ways in which they work. 

         Her journey, recounted as a literary and psychological mosaic, brings past and present, success and failure, patient and doctor, family and self into sharp focus. Through her experiences, Cohen invites us to see how the intricate details of our lives make up a complete work of art called “self.” 

         That passion informs her teaching and supervising as well as her writing, which includes her personal take on the professional problems raised by her experience with breast cancer, Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies (Kent State University Press, Fall, 2007) and a prize winning essay on the intersection of the prosaic and the professional, “Attachment is Where You Find It.” A graduate of Radcliffe College, Dr. Cohen earned her PhD in School Psychology from New York University and completed her analytic training at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), of which she is a member.