Prologue

In “how the Analyst's work shapes the analyst—i” (Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Volume 13, Number 3, 1993), we were privileged to meet, in turn, the minds of six analysts and to ponder the forces that shape them. Four men and two women led us into their private consultation rooms. The question addressed therein was what analyzing does to the analyst. While it is clear that theory informs technique, one might ask, as I did in the Prologue in 1993, “how does the work we do influence us, shape our theory, modify our attitudes and personality, influence our behavior, affect the quality of our subjective states, and leave its mark on the inner reaches of our selves?”

A common thread running through the material presented then, and in the six essays that follow, is of the analyst as a participant observer, learning about him- or herself while regressing in the service of the other. In fact, one measure of the analyst's degree of maturation could be said to depend on the extent to which there exists within him or her a growing capacity to actively engage in constructive encounters within an empathically attuned analytic space. Another common thread is the idea that the formulation of a psychoanalytic interpretation begins in the analyst's subjective experience of what it “feels” like to be with that particular other self (or aspect of self) during a specific moment of contact and then to reshape that experience within a frame of cognitive meaning.

Leo Rangell (1993), commenting on these premises in another context, validates the idea of the analyst's being affected by his work and then raises useful questions. “No clinician working for any length of time fails to register an appreciation of the occupational accomplishments (rewards and complications) of analyzing. Every hour, every day, every year accumulates its identifications, counter-experiences, approaches to anxiety, or sorties over the border, and the defenses and maneuvers away from these, on the parts of analysts i