The Analyst as (Auto)biographer

The conventional relationship of biography to psychoanalysis has been that the latter serves the former as a mode of analysis, that psychoanalysis is a powerful tool of biography. Feeling that this transaction flows too unidirectionally, I am going to work against this arrangement to explore the presence of biography and autobiography in analytic writing. This would not be a simple reversal but more likely a dialectic. Neither psychoanalysis nor biography exist any longer in pure uninflected form. Many literary genres, particularly biography and autobiography, are already infused and permeated with psychoanalytic technique and concepts. Tracing the reflection of literary conventions back into psychoanalytic writing could involve an uncanny double mirroring. But I think it could be productive to watch for the tropes of narration and of personal voice. Story telling is a form of identity making and identity maintenance, in clinical psychoanalytic writing, as Schafer (1992) has argued.

I am going to approach this topic in two ways. First, I will explore both the presence of a biographical and autobiographical impulse in analysts' writing by a close reading of three texts about and/or by the English psychoanalyst, Margaret Little. Little, an analyst who did groundbreaking work on countertransference and transference regression, was in analysis with Winnicott from 1949 to 1955. She appears (disguised) in clinical vignettes in a number of Winnicott's clinical papers. Most powerfully, however, one can see the use to which she put her personal experience in her collection of essays “Transference Neurosis and Transference Psychosis” . This interdependence of writer as subject and object is illuminated by a reading of an explicitly autobiographical essay she wrote in 1985. In Winnicott's texts, in Little's memoir and in her theoretical work, it is possible to watch subtle turns of the prism through which an analyst views and records his/her