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In responding to discussions of a paper he presented, Goldberg (1999) wrote:
One fails in the writing or delivering of a paper if the audience leaves without worry, since that, I believe, is the crucial emotion for the life of an analyst, who probably should worry her- or himself right to the grave. [p. 395]
Goldberg framed his comment as a prescription, and it is an important one. Because analysts traffic in the unconscious and in après-coup, we can honor our commitments to our patients and to psychoanalysis as a discipline only if we are constantly wondering, and wonder always teeters on the brink of worry. But what Goldberg says is also a description: we analysts do worry about our work and our theory.
Mostly we worry to ourselves or in private conversations with trusted colleagues. When we write or speak publicly, the narrative arc of our stories bends—as Mitchell Wilson notes in his commentary on Judith Fingert Chused's remarkable paper—from worry (or even despair) to relief, and perhaps to triumph, as we work through what had been disturbing and use it in the service of our patients and, ultimately, of the analytic process. In most case reports, worry is not a chronic state of mind; it is a prologue.
Chused's story, “An Analyst's Uncertainty and Fear,” stands in stark contrast to the usual account of clinical work. In part this is because her story has no real ending. The analysis is terminated in the sense that Dr.