Belonging1

Clinical work requires sharing emotional experiences with others, and such sharing requires the security that comes with a sense of community. I teach psychoanalytic intervention to students at the Wright Institute and as part of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP). Students are hungry for psychodynamic theory not because they need another modality, but because they need to know they are not alone with the harrowing stories, displaced emotions, disturbing images, blank emptiness, and hopeless confusion they absorb into their bodies and into their psyches. At its best, a psychoanalytic community provides not an education in theory, but a container for helping us tolerate, in ourselves and in our patients, what French psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis calls “the malady of being human” (2000, p. 3). We belong to the psychoanalytic community not only because we share a set of ideas, but also because we know that the weight of transference and projective identification must be carried by the community. My students are heartened to hear that even the most seasoned practitioners have a need for other minds and for other psyches. Shared thinking about a case — when it does not devolve into showing off or correcting — can be a form of communion.

Psychoanalysis offers a sense of communion with the past as well: with others who have worked with and felt for and thought about patients. I often have to explain to my students — especially those coming from medicine — that psychoanalysis is not a scientific discipline in which new models take precedence over older ones. It is more like a philosophical or religious tradition, one that deals with the foundations of meaning and fruitfully revisits old texts and old questions.

It is important, however, not to fetishize belonging, but to realize — and this is part of Freud's legacy to us — that all human needs are dialectical. They contain within them their antit