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I was assigned very early in my training Margolis's Joining, Mirroring, Psychological Reflection: Terminology, Definitions, Theoretical Considerations . It is a paper I revisit often. I originally experienced it as a useful primer on psychoanalytic technique— his breakdown of joining (p. 24) says in one single-spaced page what years of analytic training attempts to illuminate—in a form and style accessible and easy to comprehend for novices. But over time it has grown with me, or I with it, and crystallized into an meaningful keystone of what holding an analytic position might be—and something far harder to verbalize about the profound absurdity of psychoanalysis itself.
An aside—something I think about: is psychoanalysis funny? Certainly New Yorker cartoons would suggest that someone, somewhere, finds it funny. At the very beginning of training, when I would first encountered Margolis, I was routinely (and predictably) scandalized by some of the anecdotes and mythologies of CMPS. Maybe you know some of them, too—Hyman Spotnitz