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Though it is the inevitable outcome of a life lived, the decision as to the choice of one's lifetime vocation and avocation has always retained an elusive mysteriousness that defies explanation. We can guess about our motivations, but too often these inner intuitions serve the purpose more of rationalization, self-indulgence, and self-deception than true explanation. The psychotherapeutic experience should, at least in theory, facilitate this determinative process. Who, more than the psychoanalysts themselves, should be able to enhance this field of endeavor? The choice of profession of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, one can be assured, is not one only made by overt, external factors, or by reasoned pressure regarding a more powerful authority figure. It is a choice motivated by multiple and conflictual forces within ourselves. Given the intensity of this choice, one can assume that its source is indeed a fully loaded minefield of emotional conflict. What better tool than psychoanalysis to mine this hidden treasure of buried trauma, instinctual drive, unconscious fantasy, and ensuing conflict.
Joseph Reppen, the editor of the journals Psychoanalytic Books and Psychoanalytic Psychology as well as several volumes of psychoanalytic studies, asked 31 prominent analysts to answer the seemingly simple question, “Why did I become a psychotherapist?” I assume that the choice of the label “psychotherapist” would comprehensively include “psychoanalyst.”
After reading all of the contributions, I think that a more appropriate title would have been “How I Became a Psychotherapist.” The respective contributors must have been faced with a most difficult dilemma for, after all, they are still actively engaged in practice, and the need to avoid contaminating the “blank screen” of the transference is inviolate if a successful therapeutic outcome is to be attained. If one were to really reveal what he or she may have learned in his/her own analysis, then we would have to wonder about