Incognito or Not?: The Patient's Subjective Experience of the Analyst's Private Life

This paper examines the meaning for the patient of the analyst's personal life and personality which are ostensibly banished from the consulting room. The therapist has a not-always-so-secret “secret life” that the patient is supposed to “not know” about. Yet, more or less unconscious perceptions, impressions, and fantasies about extratherapeutic aspects of the analyst are omnipresent and significantly color the psychoanalytic enterprise.

Moreover, the analyst as a person generally plays a critical and underacknowledged role in the patient's experience of the endeavor. Constructing multiple overlapping images of the analyst and of the analytic relationship, the patient discovers himself or herself in the matrix of these relationships with various images of the analytic other. The analysand is motivated to make sense of the analyst as wholly as possible, the better to place into context the analyst's interventions. The patient's resulting view of the analyst's subjective experience acts as a lens that filters and subtly alters the meaning of the analyst's communications.

I illustrate these points by relating my work with a patient whose dreams uncannily picked up on a (consciously) unknown aspect of my private life—my having a handicapped son. The treatment thereafter centered on the patient's identification with my child (as someone

“disabled”) and on the meaning of her having dreamt something so personal about her therapist.