Introduction of A candidate at Work: The case of Ms. N.

For some time Abbot Bronstein, who in his role as editor of the Analyst at Work section in the International Journal has so successfully sought out presenters from many and varied different clinical situations, has had the idea that it would be good if we could present an analysis together with analytical responses from a psychoanalytic training situation. Naturally I have supported this aim from the very start. On the one hand, candidates by definition have a lot to learn in our field, theoretically and clinically, but on the other hand, it is not only that many candidates already have crucial experiences of life which they bring to their training and to their training cases, but also that they will often bring qualities of imagination and insight that may arise precisely because they are not yet saturated in a psychoanalytic atmosphere. Many a supervisor will often find that they are not just teaching psychoanalysis to the candidate, they are also learning psychoanalysis from the candidate.

Human nature being what it is, it is rare that one encounters tidy splits between the supervisor who knows and the candidate who doesn’t, or even between a supervisor who knows they don’t know and a candidate with unexpected imaginative insight. Usually there is a mess, not quite chaos, but those moments when a candidate comes up with an unexpected insight are not necessarily obvious. They may take the form more of an intuitive gesturing towards a different possibility, which the supervisor may or may not realize at the time contains the glimmer of new insight. Meanwhile, perhaps the supervisor may be trying to impart to the candidate the importance of many subtle kinds of boundaries, perhaps in how they speak and formulate interpretations, which task the supervisor may manage with more or less precision, whilst the candidate may have to work through quite a difficult period of feeling overly controlled. There are thousands of variations on these themes, which is why the process