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In setting the stage for this panel, Harvey Schwartz used an expression that, as analysts, we sometimes repress: protective self-involvement. In other words, at times, simply by virtue of being a human with their own life, the analyst needs to be self-absorbed. What happens then in an analysis when the reality of the analyst’s physical body (illness, accidents or self-preoccupations) impinges on the treatment, requiring analysts to divert attention and care from the patients to themselves? The speakers on this panel reflected on the vulnerability of the physical body; the pressure analysts are under to deny the reality of the time-limited human condition out of respect to the timelessness of the analytic process; the transformative clinical moments; and the disruptions to the analytic dyad that the analyst’s unpredictable and unavoidable life experiences impose.
Jennifer Davids’s paper, focusing on the period of uncertainty during her evolving debilitating symptoms and absence from work, and return to clinical work, after a serious injury in a car accident, was wittily entitled “Getting Back on the Road”. She emphasised the active psychic work that the analyst needs to do in order to navigate such absence. Davids emphasises the importance of the relational network around the analyst to facilitate the maintenance of the analytic dyad. In the British Psychoanalytical Society, it is mandatory to appoint two clinical trustees who help the clinician to think about and manage such clinical situations. Davids communicated directly with her patients throughout her absence for several months and did not lose any of her patients.
Chronicling the experiences and anxieties with which she as an analyst was beset in the particular situation of recovery from injury in a car accident, Davids draws attention to the bi-directional nature of the analytic dyad and to what might be considered a role reversal: what happens when the vulnerable analyst is suddenly in the role of being a pati