Acknowledging the “Analyst as Person”: A Developmental Achievement

Ientered psychoanalytic training as I imagine many people do: not fully aware of my motivations, a little frightened and a little excited by the prospect of being an analyst, but clear about my idealization of theory and “proper” technique. One of my supervisors had told me as a resident that I didn't know much theory, but that my intuition, what he called “shooting from the hip,” seemed to be working pretty well. Psychoanalytic training was supposed to remedy that. Theory in hand, or head, I would be able to understand what my patients were telling me just the way I would interpret lab tests—objectively and free from the influence of my own personhood. I would provide my patients an experience that was solely about them, so they could work through their conflicts and traumas, transferences and projections, without me muddying the field. This, I thought, was the right, the ethical, thing to do. Coming of age psychoanalytically as intersubjective theory was becoming mainstream, I soon faced challenges to my ideal of analytic objectivity.

The question I would like to investigate is the ethical implications of acknowledging the analyst's personhood. Perhaps the more relevant way of phrasing this is the ethical implications of disavowing our personhood. Because that, I think, is the point, and it is an issue that I, and our field, has had trouble coming to terms with. Each of us is a person with our own particular unconscious conflicts, motivations, and ways of relating. And these aspects of ourselves, what Jane Kite (2008) might call the character that we analyze from within, are with us in every clinical encounter. What I want to explore here is what that means about the work we do, and what