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On January 21, 2003, Henry Smith joined the American Institute for Psychoanalysis to offer an enriching presentation on the role identifications play in the development of an analyst's identity and work. As a vital mechanism to education, Smith views identifications as central to the challenging work of analytic training. Aside from learning technique, theory, and the ability to listen to unconscious process, Smith holds that candidates seek models to relieve anxiety, aloneness, uncertainty, and self-criticism. Every analyst develops a personal unique integration of the different theoretical and practical approaches with which he or she has identified over the years. Yet, Smith cautions us to refrain from idealizing the full acquirement of such an identity. Just as transferences are not fully resolved and remain active, identifications are never completely worked through, and a conflict-free psychoanalytic identity is never “fully acquired and consolidated.” To reach such a conflict-free state is a fantasy that deflects us from the reality of the analyst's mind at work.
Smith views analytic identifications as the result of “loving and aggressive wishes, the defenses against those wishes, and our own frightening self-punitive trends that accompany the work.” The analyst's feelings of love, anger, anxiety, uncertainty, hopelessness, loneliness, and personal desires to rescue or punish emerge from the dynamics between the analyst's countertransference and the patient's transference and internal objects. Because these feelings can be overwhelming, Smith notes that it is at these moments that the analyst looks to identifications with supervisors or one's own analyst for help. Particularly, early in the analyst's career, identifications serve to alleviate anxiety and as a model for learning. Yet, even later in the analyst's career, parts of these identifications continue to accompany one in the consulting room, often elicited by particular patients at certain moments (e.g.