Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

January 25, 1993. ANALYSIS, RE-ANALYSIS, AND SELF-ANALYSIS. Austin Silber, M.D.

Dr. Silber presented a deeply personal account of his analytic investigations stretching back to the start of his training analysis almost forty years ago. He emphasized the individual context of his experiences, acknowledged that there are many different pathways to psychological growth, and raised questions of general applicability.

Upon termination, his seven-year training analysis was viewed as successful by both him and his analyst. Dr. Silber felt he had gained access to previously hidden unconscious processes, learned how to free associate and to work with dreams, and how to apply these exhilarating new insights to his work with control patients. Several years later, however, he had cause to begin to doubt the thoroughness of his training analysis. His former training analyst referred a patient to him, someone whom the training analyst had previously treated and known personally. Dr. Silber was therefore in a position to learn how his analyst had interacted in inappropriate and unanalytic ways with this patient; hence Dr. Silber's continuing, unanalyzed, idealized transference was suddenly shattered. For the first time he recognized obvious characterological limitations in his analyst. Dr. Silber speculated that such an unresolved idealization (and the repressed aggression that goes along with it) often persists indefinitely in the form of a "transference cure" and may be displaced onto other ideals, such as psychoanalysis itself as a treatment or theory. If disruption