Discussion Group on Writing about Your Analytic Work in a Case Report

At the Spring 2004 meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a group of psychoanalysts assembled at a discussion group on writing about the psychoanalytic process. The Chair and two of the Co-chairs are former members of the Certification Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association. The discussion group has been scheduled at each meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association for the last eight years. At each workshop, an analyst presents a written description of an analysis that he or she conducted. The discussion group that follows addresses the writing techniques that were used to convey to the reader what happened in the psychoanalysis.

This meeting was especially illustrative of many of the ideas on writing about the psychoanalytic process that have evolved at the workshops. The Chair, Stephen Bernstein, and the Co-chairs, Jonathan Palmer, Arthur Rosenbaum, and Melvin Bornstein, felt it would be of value to convey the interchange that occurred in order to demonstrate the evolving ideas about clinical writing. Because the proceedings of the meeting were not recorded, they thought that the sense of the what occurred could be communicated if they transcribed a repeat of the workshop during a conference call where they tried to recreate the proceedings of the meeting. The following is an edited description of the discussion.