You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86, 1611-1626, 2005
The psychoanalyst needs to be in touch with a community of colleagues; he needs to feel part of a group with which he can share cognitive tension and therapeutic knowledge. Yet group ties are an aspect we analysts seldom discuss. The author defines the analyst's ‘professional novel’ as the emotional vicissitudes with the group that have marked the professional itinerary of every analyst; his relationship with institutions and with theories, and the emotional nuance of these relationships. The analyst's professional novel is the narrative elaboration of his professional autobiography. It is capable of transforming the individual's need to belong and the paths of identification and deidentification. Experience of the oedipal configuration allows the analyst to begin psychic work aimed at gaining spaces of separateness in his relationship with the group. This passage is marked by the work on mourning that separation involves, but also of mourning implicit in the awareness of the representative limits of our theories. Right from the start of analysis, the patient observes the emotional nuance of the analyst's connection to his group and theories; the patient notices how much this connection is governed by rigid needs to belong, and how much freedom of thought and exploration it allows the analyst. The author uses clinical examples to illustrate these hypotheses.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 87, 939-951, 2006
Seeing and being seen are important aspects of narcissism, where self-consciousness is always a feature, and one which becomes acute when a patient loses the protection of a narcissistic relationship and is obliged to tolerate a degree of separateness. Having felt hidden and protected, he now feels conspicuous and exposed to a gaze which makes him vulnerable to humilia