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Psychoanalysis has intrigued many since it was developed by Sigmund Freud in the late 1880s. How does this “talking cure” have such a great impact on so many lives? Who are the psychoanalysts who conduct this treatment, and how do they handle more ordinary problems they regularly encounter, as well as the difficult ones, such as patients’ threats to commit suicide or to harm the analyst?
Being a psychoanalyst involves developing a relationship with a patient, becoming attuned to his or her subjectivity, as well as to their own reactions and associations, while at the same time retaining objectivity [the so-called “observing ego”].
Two psychoanalysts, Robert Winer, MD, and Kerry Malawista, MSW, PhD, carried out a research project to explore these issues by directly interviewing a number of psychoanalysts [Note: In the dialogues between the editors and the psychoanalysts, BW refers to Bob Winer and KM to Kerry Malawista.]. They designed a questionnaire to discover “who’s behind the couch”. The interviews covered a variety of topics [the questions are given in the Appendix at the end of the book], such as the analyst’s motivation in choosing this field; satisfactions with this career choice; specific problems encountered; their reflections on their work and approaches, as well as on the interactions between their present lives and their practice. I will not list all 32 questions here, but will refer to some of them below (it might have been more useful had the questions been presented in a Preface for the reader to peruse from the outset).
Doing analytic work can be emotionally demanding. For example, one of the interviewees, Salman Akhtar, commented that sometimes he “can feel overwhelmed by having many sessions a day (eight or nine); and hearing so many things … that is one of the problems for our profession. In the morning five, and in the afternoon four [patients]. Within that time, we hear a lot, and you have to work with your own subjectivity to think about it. You