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Five points of a personal Credo: a. influences leading to my becoming a psychoanalyst, b. the contingency inherent in a dyadic relationship, c. recognizing the unique quality in personhood, d. the importance of balancing adaptive and maladaptive trends, and e. appreciating the complex emergence of meaning.
Point 1 of my credo: I believe that a credo emerges from career-related stories of lived experiences, rather than forming as a set of ideal principles. As a developmentalist I believe that becoming and being an analyst is a highly individual choice based on bits of early and later experiences—some conscious and often much unformulated—that will influence what kind of analyst the individual becomes and with what analysands he or she will have the greatest or least success.
As an analysand in three formal analyses and one self-analysis I learned, suffered, quit, and learned. My first analyst (HA) was trained in the same classical centered institute I later joined. Much attention was given to oedipal strivings and my erotic transference to her—and my guilt and shame about it. But the experience was much more than that. HA went along with my attempt to find out who I was—or at least thought I was. This inquiry centered on my fascination with the Brothers Karamazov—was I an intellectual like Ivan, full of emotion like Dimitri, gentle and idealistic like Alyosha—or, as it turned out, a bit of all three. Looking back I don’t believe HA was indulging me but was really in the exploration with me. A memorable event was the time she came into the waiting room and asked to borrow a few dollars. She was seeing a child whose parents couldn’t pick him up so she had to send him home in a cab and had inadequate money. Wow—so much for neutrality, abstinence, and anonymity and hello to humanity, caregiving, and common sense. Good child analysts of necessity had to learn to improvise and play. HA and I struggled with my use of the usual defenses but in general I felt quite free to asso