Corresponding Lives

'A fascinating collection of letters, superbly edited and brilliantly explicated by Everett. To be interested in the history of psychoanalysis is to be interested in this book.'- Professor Mark Edmundson, University of Virginia'If Corresponding Lives only provided us with the letters between a pioneering American psychoanalyst, A. A. Brill, and his patient, Mabel Dodge Luhan, a giant of American cultural history who introduced psychoanalysis to New York intellectuals, it would be well worth reading. But it delivers so much more. Through sensitive editing of their correspondence and a beautifully written narrative, Patricia R. Everett brings us inside psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century and gives us a sense of knowing this dazzling and conflicted woman.'- James William Anderson, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University'The extended correspondence between a psychoanalyst and his sometime patient offers unparalleled historical glimpses of the two most important figures in introducing and spreading Freud's ideas among American physicians and avant-garde intellectuals, with first-hand, multilevel samples showing how both psychoanalytic practice and intellectual fashion changed between 1915 and 1944. Best of all for the reader, this intimate correspondence, along with other unpublished material, is placed richly in biographical and historical context by Everett, a sensitive and wellinformed clinician scholar. In the process, a whole narrative raises fundamental questions about human relationships, boundaries, and creativity.'- John Burnham, editor of After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America