You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a paper dealing with the author's contention that analysts are trapped within their role. It is stated that this role is collectively determined in spite of the individual analyst's discriminating sense of reality checking the force of the collective, which he nevertheless absorbs and affirms.
The constituents of the analyst's idealised role have well-known antecedents, such as the doctor as a scientist who has a cure, the educator who will set us to rights, and the priest, the spiritual guide who hears the confession and grants absolution. The analytical fathers, Freud, Adler and Jung divided up these roles between them. Freud as the doctor and scientist, Adler as the educator and Jung as the spiritual guide.
The role is based on an idealisation of perfection; the doctor must be completely healthy, the educator exemplary, the priest entirely truthful—all an illusion and never to be attained. Yet analysts try to simulate it, thus living a lie. The more ill they become, for instance, the more secretive they are while affirming their well-being. This is a kind of vocational illness which also leads to lies about the patients.
The author further asserts that the analyst's concern with the chronic symptomatology of the patient is due to his own chronicity, which he describes as the analyst's most unique possession. I find these assertions somewhat overstated and blunt. No reference is made to Groesbeck's profound article ‘The archetypal image of the wounded healer’ (this Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2), which deals with a related topic more sensitively.
The most persuasive section of Blomeyer's article is concerned with the Sisyphus myth, one of hope alongside the knowledge that it may never be fulfilled. His rock is said to represent the light of consciousness which rolls down again and again. The story of Sisyphus is likened to that of the analyst whose conscious ego attempts to awaken the nascent unconscious while the death of consciousness is inevitable in the end.
S