The Identity of the Psychoanalyst

In 1976 the Saturday Review stated that psychoanalysis is one of 130 therapies which compete in the “psychotherapy jungle.” This year Time magazine raised the number of competing therapies to 200.

Fewer psychiatrists are now seeking psychoanalytic training and a significant number who complete such training are engaged in professional activities other than clinical psychoanalysis. Some lapsed psychoanalysts, graduates of all theoretical schools, have become hostile critics and have entirely disavowed a psychoanalytic identity.

The inner core of psychoanalytic identity nevertheless persists in those who recognize that psychoanalysis represents the most profound insight into the psychological nature of human beings.

A psychoanalyst understands that all human behavior and thought, be it normal or pathological, is overdetermined by many factors, a substantial number of which are entirely outside of conscious awareness. A psychoanalyst recognizes that his major therapeutic task is to help patients become aware of their internal dynamic conflicts — to recognize the transference distortions, held over from childhood, which contaminate their current lives—to help patients recognize their psychological defenses, originally acquired as survival or adaptational measures but which persist in adult life in an exaggerated, inappropriate, and disabling fashion.

A psychoanalyst recognizes that resistance to understanding the unconscious is ubiquitous. Confronting our own unconscious conflicts and primitive instinctual drives is always a narcissistic blow. Re-repression or unlearning is a universal phenomenon. The psychoanalyst may be particularly susceptible to re-repression because of the occupational hazard of unresolved fantasies of omnipotence which are reinforced by the patients' transferential idealization of the analyst. As a result, the psychoanalyst continues his personal self-analysis for his entire life.

Margaret Brenman made some penetrating observations on the persistent r