Discussion of A Candidate at Work: The Case of Ms. N.

I would like to begin by thanking Charles for offering us his material in such an open and accessible way.

While the work that Charles reports was undertaken as part of his training and hence can offer an insight into how a candidate develops his or her clinical acumen, I want to focus on the ways in which this material allows us to focus on the lifelong task we have as analysts. To my mind this is the task of expanding our emotional repertoire as we encounter different patients throughout our professional lives. When I was training in the British Psychoanalytical Society Nina Coltart told us in a seminar on clinical technique that it would take us ten years after qualification to feel assured in our identity as psychoanalysts – my experience is that it is something we strive towards until the day we retire.

While we work to alleviate our patients’ suffering, I also maintain the view, perhaps paradoxically, that the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to enable the patient to suffer their emotions – to be able to feel at an emotional level disappointment, or sadness or jealousy – to be able to suffer emotional pain. And this links with what I have indicated as being fundamental to the analyst’s developmental task – that is to say, experiencing and suffering the painful challenges that they encounter in the work.

If a patient is unable to suffer emotionally the pain that life’s events throw at them, they will find various other means of dealing with the pain. To turn to the patient Charles presents: she somatizes pain – she vomits after her sexual conquests rather than experiencing the presumably uncontainable feelings consequent on her sexual experiences; soon we hear that she suffers from diarrhea after seeing her analyst in the street with another woman. Another means of trying to avoid suffering is to minimize it – she does this with her belittling attitude to needing treatment – inviting Charles to collude with her dismissal of her need for analysis, which he manful