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I would like to describe some of my experiences working both in analytic private practice and in a college counseling service of a selective liberal arts college. I currently divide my professional time between these settings. I want to use these experiences to reflect on aspects of entanglement that appear in our work and to explore what they suggest about the psychoanalytic process and the role of the psychoanalyst. I am particularly concerned with issues of boundary. How do we (psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists) allow for and also limit involvement in our patients' lives in the course of the analytic process? And whose interests do the analytic boundaries that we employ actually serve?
Not too long ago an analysand in her fourth year of treatment was trying to extricate herself from her commitment to three sessions per week; she wanted to reduce to two sessions because, she explained (as she had on other occasions), she wanted time to get away from the analysis on a regular basis so that she could be free from the “burdensome obligation of self-examination.”
A young novelist who had already met with some success, she was only capable of writing, she said, when she could gain