A Psychoanalyst and His Patients A Room for Dreams, Hope and Desires

1. The Room   2. Premises, Expectations, Meetings   3. Adolescence   4. Ginger, Watches and Handkerchiefs   5. The Cast   6. Even Psychoanalysts Change   7. The Homosexual Archipelago   8. Women Without Memory, Analysts Without Power   9. Humanly   10. Houston, We Had a Problem   11. Red Lights   12. Live or Die   13. What Will Become of Them... and Me?   14. The Analyst's Illness   15. Leaving the Room   16. At the Door... and Then   17. Outside the Room  

Biography

Pietro Roberto Goisis is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychoanalyst based in Italy, and a past member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI) and IPA-approved Child and Adolescent Psychoanalyst. He has been also Adjunct Professor at the Catholic University of Milan. He is the author of multiple books on psychoanalysis, including Psychoanalytic Diaries of the Covid-19 Pandemic (with Angelo Antonio Moroni, Routledge).

"For anyone who has sat in the patient’s chair or ever wondered what it might be like, A Psychoanalyst and His Patients: A Room for Dreams, Hopes and Desires offer a unique opportunity to understand what it means to be on the other side of the consulting room. It is a privilege to be invited to the intimate space where the relationship between patient and therapist unfolds. With rare and disarming candour, Pietro Roberto Goisis narrates both his patients’ stories and his own experience as a psychoanalyst, revealing how therapists too are changed by the patients they care for. Despite the depth of what is explored, his fluid writing makes the psychoanalytic field feel approachable in a book that opens its doors to any curious reader."
— Micol Artom, User Research Lead, NHS

"Over a lifetime of psychoanalytic work, many people cross the threshold of the consulting room. In a series of brief, poetic, dreamlike narratives, Pietro Roberto Goisis invites readers into that intimate space where analyst and patient meet, wait, and speak—an encounter shaped by ambiguity, surprise, and the unexpected. Moving between reflection, memory, and clinical vignette, the book evokes the quiet drama of analytic work and the delicate human stories that unfold within it. One reads these pieces as one might read poems, slowly, a few at a time, allowing their images and associations to resonate. The room becomes more than a setting: it becomes the quiet container of memory where these encounters endure."
— William Glover, Past-President, American Psychoanalytic Association

"A Psychoanalyst and His Patients: A Room for Dreams, Hopes and Desires offer clinicians a rare, grounded reflection on psychoanalytic work as it is lived. With clinical precision and emotional honesty, Roberto Goisis explores the consulting room as a psychic field shaped by silence, presence, memory, and time. Moving fluidly between clinical vignettes and personal experience, he reminds us that technique emerges from the relationship between patient and analyst, not the other way around. This book will speak to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists at every stage of practice, affirming the quiet complexity of our work and the enduring importance of holding a space where transformation can occur."
— Alessandra Lemma, Visiting Professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL and Fellow, British Psychoanalytic Society

"This book does not describe psychoanalysis, but one possible psychoanalysis: that of Pietro Roberto Goisis. You will find the analyst in his room, but also the room inside his analyst. His patients, of course, but also his words, associations, doubts, mistakes, memories, emotions. Here is a psychoanalyst who talks about his work without idealization or defensiveness, minimizing theory. He conveys his idea of psychoanalysis to us: a mutually transformative experience, imperfect and deeply human."
—Vittorio Lingiardi, Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, Sapienza University of Rome, “The Sigourney Award 2023” Recipient