Integrity In The Analytic Relationship

Like many analysts, I have had more than one personal analysis-in fact, three, spanning roughly the thirty years between 1965 and 1995. As grateful as I was for my early experiences in analysis, which still continue to inform my sense of self and ability to articulate my experience, I have to confess I was also very disappointed by them. I am not talking about my having to come to terms with my first analysts' inability to overcome, beyond die initial transference cures, some of my deeper-seated complexes. In fact, these analysts did a great deal for me, and neither they nor I ever pretended my work on myself was at an end when I terminated with them. Rather, my disappointment centered around a sense of having been stonewalled rather than truly heard at key junctures when my own developing self challenged the existing selves of my analysts. At such times I felt that, instead of being held and understood in the analytic process, I was being manipulated in ways that suggested a lack of integrity in my analysts' commitment to our work. I think it was this feeling that ultimately led me to investigate the subject of integrity in the analytic relationship.

I was no less disturbed by the way my colleagues tended to deal with their similar disappointments. Moralizing about analysts that had disappointed us could not substitute for doing the psychological job of figuring out what exactly had been missing in our analyses. It was clear to me that our complaints about analytic transgressions large and small were similar in being complaints about analytic integrity, but that the problem was being framed in ad hominem and ad feminem terms. We had not asked ourselves enough how much the problem was related to our analysts' analyses and training and therefore was systemic to the practice of