My Psychoanalytic Path: Traversing the Thicket of Institutional Leadership Selected Papers of Harriet I. Basseches

“Dr. Basseches leads us through her writing on major psychoanalytic topics offering depth, understanding, and an invitation to learn and think with her. This reader includes a stunning array of articles concerning the essence of psychoanalysis and the way leadership matters—a book you really want to read and will be happy you did. It is a joy to be with Harriet.”

—NANCY GOODMAN, Training & Supervising Analyst, Contemporary Freudian Society, Washington, DC

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“This book presents in an engaging way the formative and institutional adventure of an experienced psychoanalyst, capable of sharing with her colleagues the complexity, richness, and difficulties of a job that cannot be done alone. Through her account of some of the major changes that have taken place in the history of our profession, moving from the specific context of North America to the broader field of the International Psychoanalytical Association (with particular reference to her contribution to the spread of psychoanalysis in emerging countries in other regions), Harriet Basseches also offers potential future analysts a historical and human perspective on psychoanalysis as a living science and profession that changes and evolves but maintains an unmistakable theoretical and clinical framework that profoundly distinguishes it from all other forms of psychotherapeutic treatment.”

—STEFANO BOLOGNINI, Past President of the International Psychoanalytical Association

HARRIET I. BASSECHES, PHD, ABPP is a Psychologist-Psychoanalyst who has been in practice with adults for 45 years. She received her PhD from George Washington University in Clinical Psychology in 1979, and her Certificate in Psychoanalysis from the New York Freudian Society in 1990. While belonging to many organizations, she has been particularly active in her local Psychoanalytic Institute, now named the Contemporary Freudian Society, in which she has held many positions of leadership, as well as in the International Psychoanalytical Society.  She, with two colleagues, Paula Ellman, PhD, and Nancy Goodman, PhD, have edited a volume entitled, Battling the Life and Death Forces of Sadomasochism (Karnac, 2013). She and her now deceased husband, Robert, an attorney, had three children, K.B., Josh, and Jessica. They supported and encouraged her through the years of her schooling, and later through years of her practice and professional political activity, each becoming accomplished in their own fields.