A Psychoanalytic Odyssey

This essay about my professional life is necessarily highly subjective. I have selected and highlighted areas and issues of personal interest and preference. My own theoretical and clinical ideas have evolved over the years. In some areas, experience as well as my own critical reassessment resulted in changing my views of theory and clinical practice. In other areas, I integrated aspects of the newer ideas of others, including some from the non-traditional schools of psychoanalysis. My contemporary perspective thus reflects what I consider the bedrock of psychoanalysis, my personally evolving ideas, and what I have gleaned from continuing developments and new theories. Some of the trenchant controversies in theory, clinical practice, and education, particularly of the last sixty years, will be discussed, but of necessity, briefly. I will touch upon, for example, conflict versus deficit, one or two-person analytic process, interpersonal versus intra-psychic, fantasy versus real trauma, narrative truth versus historical fact, transference object versus new object, feminine psychology, insight versus the analytic relationship, neutrality versus subjectivity, ego psychology versus object relations, and the role of the pre-oedipal period in development and in psychopathology.

When I was in medical school, although impressed as an undergraduate by my reading of Sigmund Freud, I was drawn toward internal medicine. The surgical specialties were of little interest, lacking intellectual challenge, compared to the intricacies of biochemistry, physiology, and the human heart. Only later in the clinical years did I appreciate the complexity of much of surgery and surgical research. Obstetrics had its own fascination with the pregnant body, delivery, and the awe of birth and new life. Thoughts about the new mother's psychological response to a new phase of life with her infant were associated with my thoughts and feelings about biological and psychological paternity. When I marrie