You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this direct, courageous, and erudite book, Ellen Pinsky addresses the abiding ethical vulnerability at the core of our profession as psychoanalysts. She does this via fixing her gaze (and ours) on the singular human promise of psychoanalysis on the one hand, and everything that makes us legitimately, even wisely, uncomfortable about it on the other. Pinsky emerges as both a passionate partisan and a keen skeptic as she recreates the psychoanalytic situation in full bloom while also keeping her eye on its continuous potential for fracture, decay, and misuse. Starting with
Freud’s observation that “The course the analyst must pursue is one for which there is no model in real life,”† she pointedly (and genuinely) asks: “What is Freud talking about?” (p. 26). She highlights the paradox that the “newly invented professional figure” of the analyst is “limited as a human being, (yet) limitless in the patient’s casting of him” (p. 6). The “newly invented” analyst figure is charged, that is, with being both real and unreal. How can an ordinary person be both real and unreal? And perhaps more importantly, what are the all too real occupational hazards involved? How do death and the possibility of real failure, including real harm to the patient, become crucially important ethical matters in psychoanalysis, perhaps especially in psychoanalysis?
These questions are linked to persistent foundational questions for all of us as analysts. Why do I read? Why do I write? What am I doing by becoming an analyst? Why is Ellen Pinsky writing? In Wendy Lesser’s prologue to “Why I Read” she writes: “When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer.”† I would paraphrase this as follows: “When it comes to psychoanalysis, we are all groping in the dark, even the psychoanalyst. Especially the psychoanalyst.” As a gifted writer and a scholarly and questioning/questing psychoanalyst, Pinsky is singularly well equipped to write her way into