The way we use our individual personalities is an important and overlooked element of treatment and technique that has not been directly addressed in our teaching. Graduates of analytic institutes often learn this on their own, through their hard-won post graduate clinical experience. It seems like a worthwhile effort to translate this experience into concepts that might be presented in the classroom.

In this paper I try to formulate this issue in a jargon free manner for didactic purposes. I offer a historical perspective on the topic, beginning with Freud's observations on the way in which his personality informed his own psychoanalytic explorations, his efforts to separate the “gold” of psychoanalysis from the “copper” of suggestion, and continuing on through the debates about “corrective emotional experience” and our current focus on “Enactments.” In conclusion I make some suggestions for how to think about analytic technique, and for how to teach the way we use ourselves to today's students of psychoanalysis.