Couch Tales

Roger Kennedy is a psychoanalyst in private practice, a training analyst and President of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is Consultant Psychiatrist at the Family Unit, Cassel Hospital, and author of nine previous books, including 'Psychotherapists as Expert Witnesses' (2005), and 'The Many Voices of Psychoanalysis' (2007). He is also a published poet.

• Prologue , Mr Samson, or the game of love , Three and a Bomber , Repetitions , The shadow of death , Letters from a castle , Generations , Diary of a Victorian lady , The country practice , Twist of a knife

'Wherever Kennedy has put himself into writing - being a subject, knowing a history - he has always done so from an astonishingly fresh perspective. In these deeply moving short stories he turns to fiction in order to represent himself (and analysts) from the same kind of winsome perspective he has used before...as a device. For make no mistake about it, Kennedy is not only of serious mind, and wonderfully devious delivery, he is also a brilliant writer. Try to put this book down once begun. I dare you!'- Christopher Bollas'Roger Kennedy has imagined a psychoanalyst who works through his self-questioning by imagining patients about whom he writes short stories. Being himself an experienced psychoanalyst, Kennedy creates an ingenious tension between the book, the fictional analyst's private journal and the touching stories of these doubly fictional patients.'- Dr Michael Parsons, distinguished supervising and training analyst, British Psychoanalytical Society