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I welcome the opportunity to respond to Michael Shulman's “‘Unavoidable Satisfactions’: The Analyst's Pleasure” (JAPA 64/4), in which he devotes considerable space to a critique of my article “The Analyst's Hatred of Analysis” (Kravis 2013a).
Shulman, claiming that pleasure “is a relatively unambiguous datum” (p. 698 n. 2), considers the problematizing of pleasure in analytic work mostly “unnecessary,” as well as “misleading and destructive” (p. 697). He views attempts like mine to describe analysts' ambivalence about analysis as hackneyed posturing rather than part of a long-standing tradition of self-reflection on analytic work that might contribute something worthwhile.
Where I see ambivalence, Shulman diagnoses anxiety among analysts—anxiety about feeling and expressing pleasure in their work. He portrays papers like mine as fostering this anxiety and contributing to a misunderstanding of the nature of analytic work. Toward this end he caricatures my article as depicting analytic work as unremittingly “toilsome and painful” (p. 703). In support of this view he cites a few critical comments from two of the four commentaries on my paper, those by Jacobs (2013) and Robin (2013), but ignores the more laudatory ones by Moss (2013) and Soni (2013), along with my reply to all four (Kravis 2013b). Cherry-picking of this kind to make a point is not uncommon, but in this case the result is a mischaracterization of my paper as relentlessly negative, as if I view analytic work as horribly masochistic. In reality my paper focuses not on masochism but on the analyst's narcissistic balance in the face of the demands of the analytic situation. My paper attempts to give fuller voice to the ambivalence arising from these demands, not to present a starkly negative picture of analytic work. Beginning with the first sentence of my abstract, I speak throughout my paper of both love and hate.
Shulman presents my views as both reprising a tiresome cliché of dutiful analytic drudgery and a