An Addendum to Kravis: An Appreciative Note on Hating One's Work

I applaud Kravis's paper, “The Analyst's Hatred of Analysis.” I think it crucial, when we analysts receive information indicating our own hatred for psychoanalytic work, that we possess a conceptual structure that makes it possible to treat such information neutrally: a structure that situates the hatred of psychoanalytic work within normal limits, so to speak. Kravis definitely provides us with a much-welcomed picture that positions such hatred well within the normal limits of doing sustained psychoanalytic work.

Neither critique nor supplement, what follows here, then, represents my effort to place Kravis's descriptive/phenomenological picture within a more formal structure. This move, turning something like a picture into something like a structure, concretely aims to detoxify an affect—in this case, hatred—by emphasizing its context and then shaping it into an idea. I think of my response here as a continuation of the effort Kravis has initiated. My aim is to contextualize the hatred Kravis describes, and therefore in effect to interpret it. I mean to delineate a conceptual structure that will comfortably accommodate the analyst's experience of hatred for analysis.

As Kravis so amply demonstrates, analysts must indeed contend with a hatred of psychoanalytic work. In addition, though, I think that all the hated elements Kravis describes can usefully be thought of as a set—a subset, even—not only of psychoanalytic work, but more fundamentally