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“We understand our analysands not only with what we know, but with who we are.”1 Our analytic ability to let our internal world resonate, like a sounding board, with that of the patient opens unique therapeutic opportunities but also leads to serious professional hazards, including in our relationships with our profession and with our colleagues.
Identifying with the inner world of our analysands requires going into zones of our own personality which may seem unfamiliar, or which are all too familiar but which we want to avoid because they make us uncomfortable, or which we may keep out of bounds, imagining they are not part of us at all - like cityscapes that include some areas where we feel more or less at home, others that give us the creeps and still others where we will only go at gunpoint. All psychoanalytic psychopathological possibilities can be awakened within us.
Such internal expansions in the analyst, and the defences mobilized against them, are usually unconscious until we become aware of them in the form of moods, dreams or enactments requiring self-analytic attention. We may also discover them through what our analysands unconsciously tell us about our own unconscious: our work of listening to how our patients listen to our interpretations, as described by Haydee Faimberg (1996), can reveal that some object in our inner world has unexpectedly used our voice to speak up. Most importantly for the present discussion, we may be led into our discomfort and out-of-bounds zones by exchanges with colleagues in supervision, inter-vision, clinical case conferences, working party workshops and research settings. The ultimate outcome can be personal growth (which may be why many analysts thank their analysands in their book prefaces), but the process can be deeply disturbing. I will concentrate this essay on the disturbance, examining its impact on our practice and theory, and thence on our ability to debate about practice and theory with colleagues.
We do difficult