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Our conscious and unconscious motivations for working as analysts vary, but the decisive factor is probably a great curiousity, a passionate thirst for knowledge about other people but surely about our own mental life as well. Despite this and other strong motives, the urgent question arises:
How is it possible that we manage to listen to the often severe sufferings of our analysands, while at the same time we are – in the transference – the target for their early disappointments?
Besides, the analysands have a great faculty for adressing themselves to the more fragile sides of our personalities, which naturally adds to the difficulty in avoiding the poison and the knives. We perpetually experience their bindings to us, parallel to an aggressive struggle for liberation, a matter of life and death. Furthermore, we have very little room to react openly and spontaneously and defend ourselves.
It must also be stressed that we are more often attacked if our work is grounded in the basically important idea that the transference here and now is the dynamically most potent lever in the analysis.
As is well-known, we are also the target for positive transference, from luke-warm feelings to passionate love, but if we understand the quality of this love, it is not of any narcissistically gratifying value. While we are the victims of this rather rough treatment, we are supposed to be empathic and pursue containing/holding in order to provide the right intervention at the right moment. We learn the analytical method with its frames, transference, countertransference etc., and to look at what is happening from the outside, but still we are deeply and personally involved in the analytical process. In most analyses, we are the recipients of appreciation