The Psychoanalyst's Life: Expectations, Vicissitudes, and Reflections

I attempt to make explicit and public a dialogue about the institutionalized countertransferences, in both their restraining and rewarding aspects, that beset our work and our field and that are usually discussed only reluctantly and privately. The mood usually struck in such discourse is one of stress and difficulty. Though most analysts are physicians and all are 'physicianly', dedicated to a healing discipline, we live in a world of limited cures and even of non-cures, and of demands for a continuing empathic immersion that can readily counteractively evoke in our wider life a sense of inadequacy and a defensive shutting off of emotional involvement, a social blocked empathy.

The main ingredients of these institutionalized countertransferences stem from the extreme time demands, the social isolation, and the enforced total privacy of the analytic endeavour. The consequences in anxiety over our human vulnerabilities, in the absence of social or reality correctives and safeguards, in chronic depressed anhedonic states, and in defensive self-idealizations, narcissistic arrogances, reluctances to admit the true and modest limits of our knowledge, ambivalences about research, and accentuated anxieties in our personal family and child-rearing practices are all traced.