The Listener: A Psychoanalyst Examines His Life

By Allen Wheelis and Wheelis

Book Overview

A moving and beautifully written memoir in which the author turns the exploratory lens of a brilliant psychoanalytic mind on the dark corners of his own life. Allen Wheelis has helped many patients understand themselves and cope with the legacies of trauma or obsession that shape the neurotic personality. Here he uses his own life as the uncharted territory for this same process of discovery. The story begins with his parents' courtship and a life of extreme poverty in rural Texas. When Wheelis is a small boy, his father contracts tuberculosis. He will spend several years bedridden and dying, exercising to the last a tyrannical control over his family. In one searing scene, Wheelis is punished by being made to cut the grass in the yard with a razor, a task that will occupy every day of his summer. Timidity, insecurity, and a cloyingly close connection to his mother mark Wheelis's efforts to establish himself in the adult world. In the course of trying to write a novel as a young man, Wheelis falls mysteriously ill. Eventually he realizes that he has made himself ill so that his failure to write can be excused. It is this perception that leads him to the study of medicine, and eventually psychiatry. Through his eyes, we come to understand how a gift for analysis--like a gift for prophecy--brings little comfort to its possessor, and no guarantee of happiness.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393047830
• ISBN13: 9780393047837
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Can women empathize with this?

It can be embarassing sometimes for a reader to hear about sexual desire-- particularly when it reveals so well that forbidden place men seem to know. Somehow, Wheelis avoids going overboard. At one point, he admits to the reader that if we like him, he has failed to truly reveal himself. Perhaps the reason I like him is that I am thankful. Usually male sexual desire is loaded-- we (as men) are either taught to embrace it (machismo) or chastise it. In this case I it was simply felt and explained.

A book that changed my life

I am editor of the professional journal "Psychotherapy In Australia" and also a therapist. So I've read many many books on, by, and for therapy and therapists. Allen Wheelis' "The Listener" is utterly distinctive and forced me to confront myself about just how honest I have been with myself in my own life. It is also beautifully written. I've read this book three times now, ans gained more each time, and I've set off on a quest to read all his other books. Irvin Yalom has reviewed this book by asking if a more honest autobiography has ever been written. I have no fear in answering "No".

Has a more honest autobiography ever been written?

Allen Wheelis who has written a series of extraordinary novels and professional psychiatric books, offers a moving, beautiful, and powerfully evocative memoir. Psychoanalysts, he says, know too much to hide behind self-decption and this astonishing book reveals the shape of a life seen straight, seen without distorting lenses.

A typically brilliant , carefully guided tour of reality.

They say bitter truth is the hardest to swallow, but what comes out of this beautifully written memoir is that real life, particularly as it involves the search for love relationships, can only grow out of a realistic appraisal of the possibilities. Dr. Wheelis has listened to patients for decades and spares no one (least of all himself) in this softly rendered demand for acceptance of The Way Things Are. This book, and, the listener himself, visits your very soul--and leaves it a better place.

Incisive, lucid, powerful

This remarkable memoir will become a classic for its sparse yet elegant portrayal of a man's life told with ruthless honesty, crystalline clarity, and moving effect. The reader is pulled into the unfolding story of a life often painful yet ever struggling toward mastery. The subtitle reference to psychoanalysis ought not be off-putting. This is a memoir informed by the knowledge that has come from intimate exposure to other people's lives as well as the author's own, but devoid of jargon or cant. Engaging and masterful, an outstanding read.