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I want to address a problem that I believe it is fair to say is shared by all psychoanalytic therapists. I refer to a complex of bad feelings that issues from a negative representation of the therapeutic self that inevitably and necessarily arises in our work with patients. This negative self-image and the feeling complex that issues from it I would call, respectively, the bad-analyst-image and the bad-analyst-feeling.
I have found problems with the bad-analyst-feeling to prevail among all problems presented to me by students and supervisees. I have found such problems to prevail as well in supervision groups that I attend with my colleagues, and I regularly experience such feelings myself vis-a-vis my patients and my supervisees. In the latter case the term the bad-supervisor-feeling would be more accurate.
The bad-analyst feeling arises most frequently in connection with what we are likely to experience as treatment impasses. That is, such feelings may lead us to conclude that the treatment is at an impasse. In actual fact the therapy may or may not be at an impasse. Typically in supervision the therapist who presents such a situation is most often convinced, or near being convinced, that with respect to the patient being presented, sometimes with respect to his or her entire practice, he or she is a bad analyst.
The quality of the bad-analyst-feeling will differ according to whether a given personality organization has been arrested at what