3 Review(s)

An engaging book that charts the turbulent journey from childhood to adulthood of a well-known psychoanalyst. "Our human task is to be lived by Life. Life as a transcendent principle. It seems to me that a reliable test of whether we have lived worthwhile lives is this: is the world a better place for my having lived in it?" Neville Symington has written a dozen books about psychoanalysis but this one is different from all the others. It is an emotional autobiography that starts with his own birth and gives a character sketch of his mother and father and his upbringing in Portugal, with a two year period in Canada, and takes the reader through to the age of 45 by which time he was a qualified psychoanalyst, married with two sons and, at the time, living in London. This sounds like the story of a peaceful journey from childhood through to his chosen career in adulthood. However, the author takes the reader through the period of his earlier career in the Church in a parish in the East End of London and the turbulent period of change that led him to take leave of this first career, seek psychoanalysis and finally to become a psychoanalyst himself. This is an engaging book that charts the emotional storms and the ups and downs that beset the life's journey of a well-known psychoanalyst.