Collateral Damage: Grief and Recovery after Losing a Training Analyst Due to an Ethical Violation1

This panel broke new ground in exploring the ‘collateral damage’ experienced by three candidate-analysands whose training analysts had committed ethical violations with other patients. In his opening remarks, Dr. Glen Gabbard noted that these first-person accounts constitute a unique expansion of our knowledge about boundary violations, and emphasized that collateral damage related to boundary violations is always present, including deleterious effects on other patients, institutes, and the reputation of psychoanalysis.

Dr. Candace Young from the USA provided a moving account of the personal and institutional fall-out that ensued in the third year of her training analysis after her training analyst admitted to a sexual boundary violation and subsequently lost his licence. She was given six months to deal with this profound rupture within a previously productive analysis. This period of analysis was characterized by a shared grief as well as her feelings of outrage, betrayal and loss, complicated by the analyst's growing vulnerability and neediness that evoked protectiveness and loyalty in Dr. Young. She described the experience as a unique three-fold trauma, involving the absolute loss of an analyst in a mid-phase analysis, as certainly as to a death; the traumatic collapse of idealization of the analyst; and the profound disillusionment in and collapse of idealization of her chosen profession. Dr. Young faced the dilemma of finding a new training analyst in a small professional community, and described the initial experience of analysis with a ‘replacement analyst’ as characterized by high anxiety and negative expectations typical of post-traumatic experience. Her experience of confusion, hypervigilance, and hypersensitivity to changes in frame or minor shifts arose from a profound sense of internal disorganization that was disturbing to both herself and her new analyst. She noted that a replacement analyst serves as a magnet for unmetabolized introjects of the form