Who Do You Think You are? Some Reflections on Analytic Identity

And now what will become of us without

barbarians

Those men were some kind of solution.

C. P. Cavafy

Let me begin by sharing a personal vignette. It dates back a little over 30 years when I received feedback about why I was unsuccessful in securing a place on a psychoanalytic psychotherapy training. “We thought that you were interested in too many things besides psychoanalysis”, they explained. There may well have been other reasons, but this is what they chose to relay. Needless to say, I was upset. I had very much wanted to train with that particular organisation, but I was also struck by how my interest in other disciplines – research, neuroscience, philosophy – that I had enthusiastically shared at my interview was not considered to be an asset relative to other, evidently more important, criteria in the minds of the interviewers. My interdisciplinary slant appeared to dilute my commitment to psychoanalysis, not strengthen it. My story has a happy ending. I did go on to train elsewhere as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and subsequently as a psychoanalyst. I am deeply grateful for both these experiences, which inform my attempt to address the question of analytic identity: What is it, does it matter, and if so, why? Specifically, I will approach “analytic identity” as a type of professional identity.

Professional identity formation (PIF) is a concept much discussed in other fields, where it is understood to be an integrative developmental process that involves not only the acquisition of knowledge and skills relevant to the work in question, but also, and very importantly, the establishment of core values and moral principles (Wyatt et al. 2021). At its best this developmental process equips us to articulate to ourselves and to others what we do, how we do it and the values that frame our doing of “it”. I want to underline professional identity’s communicative, external-facing function because consideration of “what is a profe