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Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is countercultural. In graduate schools and psychiatric residencies in the twenty-first century, students are faced with a menu of “the psychotherapies” and are often dissuaded from developing skills in a kind of psychotherapy that requires time for its unfolding and immersion in a relationship with another human being. Students are often encouraged to learn approaches that are “evidence-based,” that may be more singularly behavioral or psychopharmacological, and that are “more practical.” Many are skeptical about the effectiveness of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and doubtful that it has a future. This is an educational culture quite different from the one in which many of us from an earlier generation chose our professional paths.
To provide a good beginning, teachers and supervisors must introduce both orienting principles and ways for the student of psychotherapy to imagine what it is like to do psychotherapy—at a time before they have had convincing clinical experience or the benefits of a personal therapy or analysis. A psychotherapy text may generate a similar educational experience for the reader by presenting psychoanalytic concepts incisively, by providing accessible metaphors that illuminate the psychotherapeutic process, and by demonstrating the author's authentic work with patients.
A book on psychoanalytic psychotherapy that sets out to teach today's students must be engaging, persuasive, and alive. The voice of its author must be believable—one that has “the whole weight of life … behind it … that will stretch out to the reader, make him prick up his ears and attend” (Alvarez 2005, pp. 9, 16). It is a voice that must have reach.
In her essay “Finding a Voice,” Eudora Welty (1983) provides a metaphor for the ways that the more experienced teacher may assist the novice in finding her own way.