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Many life events affect treatment: pregnancy, marital disturbances, parenting issues, financial concerns, and so forth. But when I decided to write this article, I found myself with the desire to focus on the area of serious illness in the analyst. As my exploration into the subject of the seriously ill analyst progressed, I realized that a hidden agenda or unconscious motivation for my particular interest in this topic was emerging. In the process of formulating my thoughts and feelings on the subject, I was attempting to work through my reactions to my own analyst's illness several years previously, as well as its impact on my own work with patients. Although there are numerous causes for disruption in the life of the analyst, it seems to me that serious illness has the most dramatic effect on the treatment process. Rosner (1986, p. 358) asks, what happens when the analysis has to be interrupted in a state of confusion and uncertainty, without preparation and when the analyst's life itself may be at risk?
Unfortunately, psychoanalysis does not make analysts impervious to the vicissitudes of life. We are trained to be experts in empathy, to be sensitized to emotions, to examine life, yet at the same time we must continually integrate our real life experiences with our professional knowledge. One of the challenges for us, as therapists, is to integrate our life experiences in both our personal and professional lives. What happens when life experiences with the potential for enriching our understanding of ourselves interfere with our work with patients?
How life experience affects treatment poses a dilemma if one views the analyst as a person who has achieved complete maturity at the conclusion of his or her own analysis. Slakter states (1987),
Freud expressed serious reservations about the ability of anyone, including a future psychoanalyst, to so thoroughly analyze all the neurotic propensities within him in the course of an analysis that he could completely
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