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How do we become analysts? In this essay I will present a trajectory of my use of my self and my understanding of the mutual influences my patients and I have had on each other over my professional life. The use of my self and the mutual influences my patients and I have on each other, of course, are about the patient-analyst match. I believe our engagement reflects a process of working through for me, as well as for each of my patients. Events in our lives also affect who we become as people—sometimes only in subtle ways and sometimes more significantly. Changes in our selves have reverberations in our work with patients.
When I began my psychoanalytic training in 1968, we were taught that analysts were meant to be “blank screens.” Patients could and would project their difficulties onto us. Who we were, our conflicts and character, were to have been smoothed out in our personal analyses and our personalities purged of the tendency to appear in our offices. Analysts were assumed to be interchangeable. I know this sounds like a parody of analysis. I also now know that many analysts, even then, were not like this, but it is what we were taught. I admit to having been incredulous. Really? Who we were as people would not enter our work with patients? Before my training, I had worked primarily with children and been relatively free in using my self intuitively in the work.
My classical analytic training did help to provide a discipline for my spontaneity that was useful, but the idea that I, or anyone, could be grayed