Self-Analysis: A Fool for a Patient?

Derivative as it is from fragments of self-analysis, everything in this paper must be regarded by the reader as data … the manifest content of a dream that had already undergone secondary revision in writing … everything is data, the form and sequence of the presentation, the formulations, the omissions and elisions that the reader will immediately detect, and indeed even the motivation to write the paper in the first place.

An unfortunate tradition that seems to begin with the unpleasant ad hominem squabbles marring Freud's “Wednesday evening society” (Nunberg and Federn, 1962, 1967), has caused an extremely important matter for both psychoanalytic therapists and their patients to be somewhat neglected in the psychoanalytic literature: continuing self-analysis after one's training psychoanalysis. In spite of this tradition, which has made psychoanalysts understandably reluctant to reveal personal data, publications have slowly accumulated on the subject, and the issue of self-analysis after one's training psychoanalysis is turning out to be much more complicated than was originally thought. In the first part of this paper I will review the history of this subject and some of the increasing controversy it is starting to generate; in the second part of the paper I will present some personal material — which is the only kind of clinical material a paper on self-analysis, by definition, can adduce for consideration. I hope to throw some light on the issues involved in self-analysis after one's training psychoanalysis, and stimulate a reconsideration of this entire subject. Throughout the present paper, I refer to self-analysis after the successful termination of training psychoanalysis, not to the hopelessly impossible “self-analysis” sold to the general public by