Editorial

WHEN PSYCHOANALYTIC TREATMENT IS MOST successful, analysands come to learn something surprising and disturbing about the process they have undergone. People enter analysis expecting that they will learn about their life history and about its impact on contemporary experience. This, they hope, will lead to a sense of control over themselves and to an evolving capacity to change in desired ways. But as analysis continues, we all come to realize—always slowly and painfully—that the idea of a consistently controlled and indelibly "adult" or "adapted" or "analyzed" sense of ourselves is mythic. Human experience is paradoxical and conflicted at its core, and even after the most successful analysis we are left with constant shifts in our sense of ourselves and of our circumstances. No matter how strong, confident, and fulfilled we are in one moment, there will always be a next moment in which we feel weak, frightened, and embattled. Analysis cannot immunize us against these shifts and the consequent uncertainties; it can only help us to live as fully and as creatively as possible amidst ambiguity and change.

Another unexpected (and often equally unpleasant) discovery that analysands make is that the past that they work to understand is neither as immutable nor as finally comprehensible as they hoped it would be. Instead of uncovering formed but forgotten memories, they discover that the exploration of the past leads mainly to recontextualization and reevaluation. Any event, they learn, can be seen in a virtually limitless number of ways, and any judgment about "what happened" depends on the perspective from which it is being viewed. Because our vantage point shifts constantly as life unfolds, history cannot be grasped and understood once and for all. Analysands learn that the idea of a fixed, static "past" is illusory; there is only what can be creatively elaborated at any moment. It is in this sense that psychoanalysis is most radically interminable.

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