Milton Wexler was among the most unconventional, compelling, and
sometimes controversial figures of the golden age of psychoanalysis in
America. From Teachers College at Columbia University to the Menninger
Foundation in Topeka to the galleries and gilded hills of Hollywood, he
traversed the country and the century, pursuing interests ranging from
the treatment of schizophrenia to group therapy with artists to advocacy
for research on Huntington's disease. At a time when psychologists and
psychoanalysts tended to promote adjustment to society, Wexler
increasingly championed creativity and struggle.
The Analyst is an intimate and searching portrait of Milton Wexler,
written by his daughter, an acclaimed historian. Alice Wexler
illuminates her father's intense private life and explores how his life
and work reveal the broader reaches of Freudian ideas in the United
States. She draws on decades of Milton Wexler's unpublished family and
professional correspondence and manuscripts as well as her own
interviews, diaries, and memories. Through the lens of Milton Wexler's
friendships, the book offers glimpses into the lives of cultural icons
such as Lillian Hellman, Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers), and Frank Gehry.
The Analyst is at once a striking account of the arc of an iconoclast's
life, a daughter's moving meditation on her complex father, and a new
window onto on the wider landscape of psychoanalysis and science in the
twentieth century.
