Self-Analysis and Resistance to Self-Analysis of Countertransference

The clinical vignettes in this paper will show how self-analysis can be used fruitfully at certain important moments or episodes during psychoanalytic treatment when the psychoanalyst is avoiding what could be a more therapeutic experience for the analysand for the analyst's own defensive purposes. Self-analysis during these periods in the treatment can enable the analyst to uncover his “blind spots” and do the personal analytic work necessary to prevent these tendencies from impeding the work with other analysands. It will also be demonstrated that the analyst must be aware of the difficulties and limitations of self-analysis to truly benefit from the self-analytic process. Self-analysis can be an extremely useful tool. However, it can also be a tool that, if used improperly as a means of resolving a counteresistance, will only take the analyst further off course.

This would seem to be a good time to participate in the psychoanalytic discourse about self-analysis by commenting about why analysts steer away from some material in their work with their analysands, and why they resist self-analysis when they do so. It is the nature of the material that is stirred up in the transference-countertransference field—-its content and its intensity-that accounts for the reluctance of analysts to write about self-analysis of their counterresistances. Because this has not been appreciated, there has not