On Beginnings and Endings: Reflections of an Early Career Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst

In reading the Ingram and Stine article in this issue (“How Senior Psychodynamic Psychiatrists Regard Retirement”), I was surprised by how much I could relate—as an early career psychiatrist and newly minted psychoanalyst—to the mixed feelings expressed by my senior colleagues as they reflected on approaching the final phase of their careers.

You see I, too, am in mourning—over the recent loss of my analyst, analytic training, and supervisors that have accompanied my psychoanalytic graduation. One could say such losses occurred in the face of the accomplishment of completing analytic training, just as one could probably say my senior colleagues face retirement after experiencing long and illustrative careers in their field. But as Herbert Schlesinger (2005) states in his book on endings, for every accomplishment achieved one must also mourn the accompanying loss of your former self as you strove to achieve it. Perhaps my senior colleagues, too, had been looking forward to retirement only to get there and realize they felt far more ambivalent about it than previously expected.

While it initially surprised me that as an early career psychiatrist/psychoanalyst I could relate to the feelings expressed by those nearing the later stages of their careers, upon further reflection it no longer seems such a great divide. I have come to agree with Schlesinger that endings and beginnings are not a linear phenomenon but rather a cyclical loop repeating itself over time. From my training in Brief Dynamic