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“While we all experience suffering, we may not have fully formulated our attitude about its place in psychic life. When is suffering to be borne, rather than medicated, muted, or eradicated?” asked Dr. Buechler in a careful meditation on analytic attitudes toward psychic suffering. Dr. Sandra Buechler, a Training and Supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, has written extensively on emotions in psychoanalysis, including papers on hope, joy, loneliness, and mourning in the analyst and patient. In her 2004 book, Clinical Values: Emotions that Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment, Dr. Buechler examines the role of hope, courage, the capacity to bear loss, the ability to achieve emotional balance, and other factors in treatment. Her most recent book, Making a Difference in Patients' Lives: Emotional Experience in the Therapeutic Setting (2008) is a personal description of the process of therapeutic change.
Focusing particularly on how these attitudes motivate how, when, and if to analyze the defenses, in this presentation Buechler spoke from her career-long concern with the impact of the analyst's values and emotions on the therapy process. Among the diverse attitudes that exist toward the value and role of emotional suffering, Buechler identified three main perspectives: (1) Suffering is foremost a symptom to be ameliorated through treatment, which may include medication and other expedient interventions; (2) Suffering is “a human inevitability,” and thus treatment should encourage patients to accept and endure pain, hopefully with more dignity and ease; and (3) Suffering is “the path toward redemption and self-knowledge,” and thus treatment is a process of learning from pain, a master guide to personal growth and enlightenment. These disparate attitudes develop through an array of personal and professional experiences, themselves influenced by broader cultural values related to the proper place of suffering (Buechler, 2010).
Citing examples from her own pr