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“The Analyst's Hatred of Analysis” is an important paper, one that should be widely discussed at our institutes, and also by analysts everywhere who are seriously engaged in clinical practice.
Kravis raises an issue that is familiar to all practitioners but has not been openly confronted in our field. Actually, Kravis takes up a number of related issues in this intriguing paper. In this brief discussion, I can touch on only a few of them. What I have to say reflects a personal response to Kravis's argument. I cannot speak for others, nor can I assess the degree to which Kravis's assertions are applicable to analysts as a group. While some of Kravis's statements will, I believe, resonate with most if not all analysts, others seem to be more subjective and may reflect the feelings and experiences of the author rather than being generally applicable.
My first response to Kravis's use of the term hate was that it was an exaggeration. From time to time, all analysts experience fatigue, boredom, anxiety, frustration, discouragement, exasperation, and even despair in the course of analyzing. If one is truly engaged in the work, such emotions are inevitable. What we do is hard, taxing work, and while it surely has its joyful moments as well as deep satisfactions, it is bound to evoke a good many negative emotions.
But as a general rule, do analysts truly hate analysis? If in using this term, Kravis is referring to the primitive hatred that an infant experiences