NONFICTION - March 5, 1995

A DIFFERENT KIND OF LISTENING My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow by Kim Chernin (HarperCollins: $22; 215 pp.) On the surface, a detailed, first-person account of someone’s 25-year journey through psychoanalysis may seem solipsistic at best, and spiritually bankrupt at worst. However, Kim Chernin’s book generally manages to avoid these qualities. The sheer power of Chernin’s intellect coupled with a vaguely spooky ability to completely divorce herself from her self, makes this analytical autobiography compelling in an abstract, cerebral sort of way. Here is Chernin describing the end of her second analysis: “Some people think of the self as a circular staircase. You complete the first circle, the spiral begins again at a lower level . . . only this time you have descended further into the self’s recess . . . analysis can legitimately end each time a spiral has been chalked off. In that sense, unless you are stalking the infinite, there will always be something arbitrary, chosen, fallible about an analytic end.”

At the heart of “A Different Kind of Listening” is the slow formation of Chernin’s own ideas about analysis (she has a private practice in Berkeley) and this is where the book really shines. Before reaching that point, the writing, though wonderful, doesn’t always make the leap from her interior into ours. In addition, it’s never made clear what, exactly, is the goal of 25 years of analysis. Granted, Chernin definitely seems more at home in her own skin by the end of the process, but how much of that can be explained by the natural maturing that takes place over 2 1/2 decades.