On Analyzing Colleagues1

OF ALL THE ANALYSES CONDUCTED worldwide, a considerable number—in some places, maybe a majority—are analyses of mental-health professionals, some of them psychotherapists. Very little, however, has been written on the importance of this fact, except for the literature on training analyses, a unique subgroup of the analyses of colleagues.

How are we to understand this neglect? It must be considered in the context of a broader issue: the place of "external" reality in the psychoanalytic conceptualization of mental life (Bromberg et al, 1991).

We recognize the pendular shifts in emphasis given to external reality in our theorizing about the way in which psychic reality in childhood is shaped. Central in Freud's seduction theory, it was pushed aside in his later oedipal model, rediscovered by Ferenczi, deemphasized by Klein, and reemphasized by Winnicott and Kohut. Winnicott suggests that "in health the child's interest is directed both towards external reality and towards the inner world, and he has bridges between the one world and the other (dreams, play, etc.)" (1958, p. 208).

Issues regarding our understanding of adult mental life, and specifically of the treatment process, have been no less shifting and controversial. The classical conception of transference, emphasizing displacement and (later) projection, and treating the patient's perceptions of the analyst as mostly distortions, gave the reality of the analytic situation and the analyst's actual personality a rather marginal role in analysis. In this framework, "external" reality (itself a term conveying a nebulous quality, as Erikson [1962] reminds us) was viewed as a shallow layer mobilized for resistant rationalization, allowing a defensive avoidance of deeper experiences and deflecting the analytic focus from the centrality of psychic reality. The "two realities, " outer and inner, were seen as competing for