Excerpts from Dr. Schimel's Publications

THE IDEAL OF EGALITARIANISM WILL BE considered to mean essentially an institutionalized belief in the doctrine of equal dignity and opportunity for all. I believe that it produces pathological aspects when actual differences between persons are denied. The role of the psychoanalyst, like that of any expert in an egalitarian society, may be an uneasy one. Uneasiness may be expressed both in confessions of the limitations of the expert's field and in avowals of faith in a future statistical validation of psychoanalytic therapy.

The practice of referring a patient to several analysts, a reflection of uneasiness, seems often to be based on an egalitarian notion. One does not usually refer a patient, for example, to several cardiologists, as though the patient were as competent as the doctor to select. And yet one repeatedly sees distraught patients with lists of three or four names of analysts. Some such patients, who take literally the advice to look and choose, protest the fees or the repeated retelling involved in the selection process. It would seem that egalitarianism can be other than constructive in this context. Clara Thompson observed that certain patients who had a choice of analysts showed an uncanny ability to select the analyst least likely to disturb their neurosis. Patients can, however, exercise rational, if uninformed, judgments in this regard. My patients have chosen me for some of the following rational reasons:

• 1"Your name was first on the list."

• 2"Your office is the closest to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel."

• 3"I preferred a Gentile." (I am not.)

• 4"Your waiting room was so tiny I felt your fees would be moderate."

The analyst's position is one of power, authority, and responsibility. If he is not superior to the patient in his knowledge of human behavior, one supposes that there is no point to the whole business in the first place. In his continuing work with his patients,