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In recent years, psychoanalytic research has evolved in at least two prominent directions. One approach involves the study of the psychoanalytic process focusing on efficacy and outcome studies. Another has been a series of qualitative studies dealing with topics ranging from analysts' conceptions of how they work clinically and theoretically to candidates' experiences
of termination. Tessman's The Analyst's Analyst Within falls squarely into the former category and is reminiscent of such books as Hamilton's The Analyst's Preconscious (1996) and Kantrowitz's The Patient's Impact on the Analyst (1996), both published by the Analytic Press as well.
Tessman's mission is to understand the intrapsychic presence of the analyst in the minds of patients who are themselves psychoanalysts and in large measure are referring to their training analyses, or their second analyses conducted after training. Her subjects are 35 psychoanalysts (22 men and 13 women), 30 of whom are members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire dealing with such issues as, “How is the analyst remembered differently when an analysis was deeply satisfying, moderately satisfying, or not satisfying at all?” “What sorts of surmised attributes of the analyst are viewed as linked to the potential for or obstacles to mutative change?” Similar questions were addressed to the issue of changes in intrapsychic representation of the analyst over time, post-termination contact or its absence, and the socio-cultural context of the psychoanalytic institute as representative of prevalent theory and practice. Sampling procedures were aimed at obtaining subjects who were analyzed during different eras of psychoanalytic practice, ranging from 1945 to 1955 and from 1985 to 1995. In addition to the questionnaire data, in-depth interviews, lasting from 2 to 8 hours, were conducted with a representative sample of the research participants. Much of this book is made up of exc