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When I was a child, a psychoanalyst told me that most people become analysts to learn about themselves. I wasn't sure what he meant. Was it learning from books? Or by studying others? Or the required training analysis I had heard about? Later Elvin Semrad, who taught several generations of residents at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston, would say the opposite: that candidates lie on the couch thinking it's for training, and it takes them “about two years” to find out they need to be there. Both my surmise about learning from books and Dr. Semrad's pointed comment speak to a major obstacle to the analyst's self-learning — his or her own resistance to the work. If Gill (1982) writes cogently and consistently about resistance to the analysis of the patient's transference, we are only beginning to realize the impact of the analyst's parallel and symmetrical resistance to his own self-analysis, including the analysis of his own ongoing transference to the patient.
How the analyst learns about himself is still a mystery in part because it is one of the areas of our work that we speak about rarely and write about almost never. Although Freud pioneered self-analytic work and described his personal experience in detail, he became skeptical about its results, and while he acknowledged his dependency on his patients for his own self-understanding (Freud, 1887-1904, p. 281; Loewald, 1960), he rarely described