The Analyst at Work: Editors' Introduction

‘The Analyst at Work’ is now a regular feature of the Journal. Originally suggested by Henry F. Smith, when he was a member of the North American Editorial Board, this format allows for respectful and constructive dialogue regarding different analytic perspectives on clinical data. It also raises complicated methodological issues. The clinical material provided is not a compilation of factual observations. It is a construction or ‘text’ composed by the analyst that attempts to capture the experience of two persons in a consulting room on a particular day or days. Our discussants then attempt to interpret the text according to their respective psychoanalytic cultures and their own unique subjective understandings. Their task is challenging because they must create their interpretations from written words on a page, not from immersion in vivo in the ebb and flow of an analytic session. The patient's transference is to the analyst, not the discussant. The patient's tone of voice, subtle body movements, change in breathing patterns, sighs and whispers all escape the discussant's scrutiny. Our two commentators, then, are writing about a ‘patient’ who is somewhat different for them than for the analyst. They must enter an arena of imaginative play within which they can picture what might be going on in the session and speculate on different ways of looking at the content and the process. They are not supervising the analyst, but merely engaging in a form of creative reflection by placing themselves in the analyst's chair and allowing their associations to lead them in one direction or another. We hope that this exercise is instructive to our readers and that it paves the way for greater explorations in the largely uncharted territory of comparative psychoanalysis.