“Lady Analysis” in Full Splendor: Response to Commentaries

I thank Drs. Jacobs, Moss, Robin, and Soni for their thoughtful and stimulating commentaries. Their remarks highlight and reframe some of my major themes in ways that I find helpful in clarifying and deepening what I am trying to say.

I am mainly saying that good analytic work is intrinsically narcissistically depriving and that the analytic task creates conditions that in some respects thwart the healthy narcissistic strivings of analysts. I conjecture that this can lead to hatred of analysis, and I have tried to sketch the forms that this hatred can take, both in the individual clinician and in institutional and organizational psychoanalysis. I assert that some degree of hatred of analysis (in other words, ambivalence) is normative and expectable yet often experienced as shameful. Here, too, I have tried to indicate how I think analysts deal with such shameful feelings if/when they arise. I believe that some of these ways of handling shame are (and have been) destructive (clinically, pedagogically, and communally).

Jacobs suggests that some of my comments apply better to a more authoritarian past and/or to my own subjective experience. My contention, however, is that some problems faced by clinical analysts are timeless and intrinsic to the analytic situation. I have tried to explore how analysts' responses to these difficulties may color their experiences of the social and political world around them, including their interactions with each other.

Jacobs cites as the prime example of analysts susceptible to experiencing hatred those who leave the practice of analysis because they find they do not like it. I point out in my paper that analysts who idealize psychoanalysis place themselves at greater risk for eventually angrily denouncing it. But I have focused my discussion mainly on the struggles of those who stick with it.