What can We Learn from Second Analyses?

Chair Gerald Fogel said he had convened this panel to take up the question of what second analyses can tell us about analytic process, both its potential and its limitations. This question, he noted, had not been addressed at a meeting of the American for many years, during which time significant changes were occurring in the profession. One of these changes is the ascendance of a two-person psychology as an orienting perspective for practitioners. Another important development is the much greater openness analysts now have regarding their need for continued self-reflection and self-analysis. Analysts feel much freer to discuss their countertransference reactions and to consider without shame the possibility of embarking on their own second analysis. Given that the scant literature on reanalysis focuses almost exclusively on the mistakes of the first analyst and the question of the analysand's analyzability, Fogel found good reason to think that a panel of contemporary analytic thinkers, from varying backgrounds and orientations, would generate new and useful insights. Dominique Scarfone, a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Montreal, is in the tradition of French analytic training. Theodore Jacobs is from the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute; his broad North American viewpoint is influenced by a traditional ego psychological approach and by an interest in the use of countertransference and the self in treatment. Maxine Anderson has trained both at the Seattle Institute and in England and currently is influenced greatly by Kleinian/Bionian theory and technique.

Jacobs's contribution, “On Reanalysis,” dealt extensively with the experience of the current analyst's countertransferences toward the previous analyst (or analysts). He opened with a description of his first analyst. As a college student he began an analysis with an analyst he said “would