Fathering or How I Ended Analysis (Again)

‘I have recommended Dan Gunn’s Wool Gathering to many people interested in the process or experience of analysis. This, its sequel, I recommend to anyone with a beating heart. This is a love story: a story replete with love for a woman, a mother, a father, for a child not yet conceived, but also for literature, both in its content and its execution, and finally for psychoanalysis and the journey it supports. It is a book of inspiration and conviction, of ideas and feelings. It is also a genuine page-turner. Read this book!’

Calum Neill, psychoanalyst, Professor of Psychoanalysis & Continental Philosophy, Edinburgh Napier University, author of Jacques Lacan: the Basics

‘Couched as a journal, Fathering tells the story – touching, at times moving – of the two years that Dan Gunn (a Scot) and his decades-younger partner (a Bulgarian) spent striving to conceive a child in France. Eminent commentators on fatherhood, headed by Samuel Beckett and Jacques Lacan, are allowed to intrude and have their say; also included is a sprinkling of anecdotes, delivered with grudging admiration, about interactions with the branches of the French bureaucracy tasked with making the lives of foreign residents as difficult as possible.’

J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize in Literature, 2003

‘In this wonderful sequel to Wool-Gathering, Dan Gunn moves gracefully into and out of the consulting room, weaving together his meditations on fatherhood and his reflections on psychoanalysis, not so as to instruct, but so as to entertain and engross the reader. Fathering discusses, always with a light touch, the work of Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan whose notion of the ‘cut’ – the analyst’s way of punctuating a session by interrupting it at crucial moments – has implications: just as the analysand never knows when a session will end, so the reader will wonder just how and where this story about ending an analysis (again) will break off. Where Wool-Gathering was structured as a countdown to an end, Fathering opens toward a world teeming with possibility and new life.’

Michael Levine, Distinguished Professor of German, Rutgers University

‘This wonderful book took me completely by surprise. A personal diary, a story of psychoanalysis, a paean to Samuel Beckett and to literature, a post-Brexit lament, a meditation on teaching, an illumination of fathering, of loss, ageing, hope and – it feels ridiculous to spell it out, yet here it is – of love. Funny, scabrous, moving, tense, reconciliatory: Fathering, or How I Ended Analysis (Again) is a defiantly humane achievement.’

Stephen Frosh, Emeritus Professor, Birkbeck College, University of London, author of How to be Real.

‘As demonstrated by his earlier book, Wool-Gathering or How I Ended Analysis, Dan Gunn writes lucid, elegant sentences – rare in a professional literature that is too routinely muddied by polysyllabic jargon. Again, Gunn shows a better way.’

Ellen Pinsky, psychoanalyst, author of Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts

‘Fathering or How I Ended Analysis (Again) artfully weaves the author’s experience of terminating a long and transformative psychoanalysis together with that of trying to become a first-time parent at sixty. Suspense mounts as we wonder if this man who scarcely knew his own dad will succeed in his dream of fatherhood. Dan Gunn once again proves himself to be an incorrigibly brilliant memoirist as well as a shrewd observer of the political vagaries of our time. This book is serious fun.’

Deborah Anna Luepnitz, psychoanalyst, author of Schopenhauer's Porcupines