In this first-of-kind book, senior psychoanalysts from around the world offer personal reflections on their own training, what it was like to become a psychoanalyst, and what they would like most to convey to the candidate of today.

With forty-two personal　letters to candidates, this edited collection helps analysts in training and those recently entering the profession to reflect upon what it means to be a psychoanalytic candidate and enter the profession. Letters tackle the anxieties, ambiguities, complications, and pleasures faced in these tasks. From these reflections, the book serves as a guide through this highly personal, complex, and meaningful experience and helps readers consider the many different meanings of being a candidate in a psychanalytic institute.

Perfect for candidates and psychoanalytic educators, this book inspires analysts at all levels to think, once again, about this impossible but fascinating profession and to consider their own psychoanalytic development.

Fred Busch, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and on the Faculty of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies. He has published over 70 articles in the psychoanalytic literature and has been invited to present his thinking about clinical technique throughout the world. He's published four books on the psychoanalytic method, the last two with Routledge, Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind (2013), and The Analyst's Reveries: Explorations in Bion's Enigmatic Concept (2019).