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In his introduction to this collection of 18 essays, Steven Kuchuck expresses the hope that the reader will be encouraged to think, as his contributors have done, about the ways in which their own life experiences affect their technique, professional choices and the transference/counter-transference dynamics they experience in their work.
The accounts included here certainly offer thought-provoking perspectives on finding one’s way to a personal and professional identity as an analyst or psychotherapist. They also raise complicated questions about the relationship between analysis and self-disclosure – and suggest some contentious answers.
In the spirit of exploring subjective perspectives, I will say that my first impression of the book was an increasing and somewhat unsettling sense that the authors were describing a professional culture that was some distance away from the one I recognise, both in space (most of the authors are based in the United States) and time: although Kuchuck says he ‘came of institute age as recently as the early 1990s’ (p. xx) there have been many changes in the professional and political landscapes over those 26 years. His is a culture that seems surprisingly unfamiliar. At times, the analytic stance the authors seemed to be reacting against in wishing to be allowed to explore subjectivity and disclosure in their work sounded unlike anything I have come into contact with in my psychotherapy trainings; indeed it sounds more like the straw man of psychoanalysis that sometimes makes a spectral appearance in psychology lecture theatres. In that context, a stereotypical view of the analytic stance is often pitted against the more socially ‘normal’ and ‘collaborative’ presence of cognitive behavioural therapists. If Dialectical Behavioural Therapists use self-disclosure in the service of enhancing the intimacy, warmth and strength of the therapeutic relationship (see Linehan, 1993, p. 377), are analysts, in their choice not to act in this way, t