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Psychoanalytic training, including personal analysis, dramatically affects a candidate's individual and professional identity and, like a chrysalis, gives rise to the emergent psychoanalyst after at least four years of intensive formation within an accredited institute. The candidate assumes the mantle of the analyst with evolving competence and, through multiple identifications, joins the group represented first by her personal analyst, then teachers, branch, and national society and, in due course, the community of analysts at large.
Yet this psychoanalytic identity cannot be taken for granted and, as experience shows, it is too often fragile and must be nurtured by psychoanalytic activity and group involvement throughout the analyst's career. Paradoxically, although intensive psychoanalytic training exerts a profound influence on individual and professional identity, it is at the same time vulnerable to erosion over time. There are several reasons, I believe, for this occurrence.
First, psychoanalytic identity generally sits as the top layer of an individual's professional formation inasmuch as training usually occurs after a primary professional identity has been established. Hence the majority of Canadian analysts become physicians and psychiatrists first, while a smaller percentage begin their professional careers as psychologists or pursue an academic or social science discipline before entering an institute. Occupying the top layer, the psychoanalyst identity itself may deepen more in certain individuals than others who encompass, perhaps, a greater share of those intellectual and human qualities that comprise the analytic attitude. The reasons for this outcome remain unclear, although it seems that some members achieve an absorbing identification with psychoanalysis as a mode of thinking, valuing, and practising. In other instances, psychoanalysis