The Analyst's Ego

If, as Freud suggested, the character of the ego is a precipitate of lost and abandoned objects, and the history of those object choices (1923, p. 29), then what happens to the analyst's ego over time as a consequence of his or her daily empathic introspections with patients as significant objects? Since we listen to our patients with affective as well as cognitive receptors, under similar behavioral constraints as they, we take in far more than we can process consciously. Even though we expect the analytic perceptual instrument to be well honed through training and personal analysis, and that technical neutrality will insure sufficient distance for objectivity and self-regulation, we may miss certain second and third level effects that reverberate and remain with us long after the analysand has departed from the couch. How then does the analyst's work affect the analyst? What does analyzing do to the analyst?

Each analyst arrives at his or her personal and professional maturity by a different subjective route. Each carries into the work a variety of institutional, philosophical, and personality imprints that may enrich or hinder creative investment. Despite all this, as Harry Stack Sullivan reminded us, “we are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever” (1947, p. 16). Thus the complexity of the specific