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My remarks begin with a quote from that poet, muse, and troubadour extraordinaire of the Woodstock generation—Joni Mitchell:
An angry man is an angry man.
An angry woman—bitch.
From the first days of our postgraduate psychodynamic training, we are explicitly taught and implicitly begin to understand why clinical practice actually gets harder over the course of a career. The more theories we are exposed to, the more interventions and styles we try out, and particularly after we are repeatedly tested by our most important consultants, our patients, we hone skills meant to last a lifetime only to find ourselves caught up short by how much we do not know and will never master in any given treatment process. To those just getting their sea legs in this field, such testimony might sound daunting, dreadfully depressing, jaded—a “little bitchy”—or surprisingly exciting, encouraging, even daring: You might not have to worry so much about getting it right because it's much more likely you never can, given the range of materials to draw on and from which you write your distilled, detailed process notes. So we all might reasonably wonder why it is the rare paper, such as this one by Sidney Phillips, that describes in some detail how an experienced analyst goes about making a radical departure in the middle of an ongoing analysis. Apparently both parties survive this about-face, and perhaps even begin to thrive in new ways in the treatment, because the analyst took a leap into the unknown. Phillips made a decision to change everything about the way he was going about his analytic business to save not only the treatment but also Mr. K.'s life. I would not use the word lifesaving