You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is hardly unusual to acknowledge the uniquely complicated reasons for choosing this career once our grandiose, omnipotent fantasies are unleashed and our need to cure made less benign. And yet, as Sandra Buechler makes clear, we still keep trying. What remains less explored is its progress. Indeed one rarely discusses a psychoanalytic “career” although we move through its visible and invisible structures; but what is a successful psychoanalytic career? Multiple times a week patients and referrals? Money? Becoming a training analyst and leading a committee of the Apsaa? Or weathering the storm? Hour by hour, just how long can this continue without an explosion at the helm?
With compassion and curiosity, Buechler, with a long and objectively successful career, reflects back on the challenges to maintaining a sense of hope, joy and curiosity when faced with the losses, endings and self-doubts that haunt us daily, taking their toll on clinicians and their patients, peers and candidates through the potential repercussions in the countless boundary violations and other acting out this can provoke. Buechler demands compassion for our own struggles and narcissistic needs not just to safeguard our self-esteem, but to benefit the profession itself.
Her book explores how our careers create a foundation for an ongoing experience of shame. Shame, as Buechler argues, is a particular emotional experience due to its interpersonal dialectic. We not only conceal ourselves from our shame to keep going, but when noticed by others it becomes even more pervasive. She explores the unforeseen and sometimes tragic consequences of our progression through the ranks and draws in stark relief how this contributes to our depressions and silent departures. Indeed, I would add, our love of survival stories in the trenches can mythologize, transforming these moments into character building, a way to join the clan, sink or swim. The real analyst survives the attack. Shame on those who can't take th