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Lena Ehrlich’s book, Psychoanalysis from the Inside Out: Developing and Sustaining an Analytic Identity and Practice, should be read by every person who aspires to have a robust analytic practice. However, readers may not want to read it at bedtime - for me, it had the power to disrupt my sleep!
In this book, Ehrlich turns a psychoanalytic eye on the practising analyst. She carefully and thoughtfully draws out innumerable internal resistances on the analyst’s part to the practice of analysis, illuminating resistances to recommending analysis, resistances to deepening analysis and broader resistances to sustaining an analytic practice. In the process, she forcefully addresses our own role in diminishing the practice of psychoanalysis, highlighting our conflicting swings between idealizing analysis and devaluing it. As Ehrlich insists, “If we’re to do justice to the complexity of our work as analysts, we have no resting place regarding understanding our motivations. As soon as we’ve identified our reluctance to analyze, we need to question our analytic zeal” (87).
Ehrlich opens the book with an examination of the analyst’s reluctance to offer analysis, unearthing the way in which behind the allure of training to be an analyst lies a hidden fear, and at times even a repulsion, of the messy affects that psychoanalysis stirs in both the analyst and her analysand. Ehrlich shrugs off the external rationalizations as to why psychoanalysis is less commonly practised, even by trained analysts. Instead, Ehrlich looks inward, to consider the analyst’s counter-resistances, her ambivalence and even her unconscious hatred of analysis. This is where the ground may tremble under a reader’s feet: Ehrlich proposes that trained analysts frequently eschew the recommendation of analysis even on occasions when their training affirms its appropriateness. Through clinical vignettes, she displays an array of emotional vectors that underlie her own reluctance to analyse. Ehrlich makes no mentio