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September 28, 1987. SELF INQUIRY. Rivka Eifermann, Ph.D.
Dr. Eifermann, President of the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society, has had a longstanding interest in the uses of self-analysis. In connection with teaching a course on dream analysis, she has analyzed her own dreams for many years. When she took part in a joint seminar on psychoanalysis and literature, she was disturbed by the tendency of some literary experts to "analyze" literary characters without any awareness of important differences between such attempts and the processes and products of clinical psychoanalysis, as well as of self-analysis.
Dr. Eifermann presented a method of self-analysis based on the recording of her dreams and associations. For Dr. Eifermann, as for many others, this type of inquiry is associated with a feeling of inner pressure. At times the pressure is manifest, while at other times various intellectual distractions and sublimations can obscure the full impact of the feelings. In her published work, Dr. Eifermann's goal has been to present meaning from within that could be used to advance general understanding. Her work expanded when she discovered that she could apply self-analytic methods to uncover underlying themes in her own writings. She has thus been able to understand material in ways that were previously unknown to her. For example, she described her analytic inquiry into a paper she had written prior to analytic training, a paper about children's games from the point of view of a developmental/social psychologist. She found that self-analytic inquiry was a "search method" that became a means of reaching new ideas and hypotheses hidden in the material, ideas that years of research had not brought into focus. Once the possibility of sharing publicly the processes and product of self-analysis is seriously considered, conflicted feelings about self-revelation arise. Dr. Eifermann discussed some of the problems that accompany the sharing of intense or intimate material