I recently came across an article about two very different men who were living literary lives. One man, in his late thirties, had spent nearly ten years dedicated to a single work, which he had financed, created, produced, and published himself. It had been a labor of love, according to the article, for which this impassioned man had willingly sacrificed much time and money. The second, a man in midlife, had managed to balance two conflicting careers in order to keep alive the flame of his literary passions. After many years of dedication and sporadic recognition, this man was beginning to realize the ripening fruits of his labors, as his major works were finally being accepted for publication.
As I read and reread this short piece of non-fiction, I began to realize that what piqued my interest was the identification I felt with these men. I have never been a writer, nor do I imagine myself living a literary life. So where was all this personal resonance coming from? The answer popped out of my mind with a little shudder—there were similarities to my experience of the psychoanalytic candidates life.
Becoming a psychoanalyst is not about choosing a career; it's about choosing a life. My experience as a candidate has been an amalgamation of sweat, tears, and itching. The itching is about always scratching below the surface, and wanting to do it over and over. Like the writers described in the article, I pursue this kind of labor because the passion for it is simply and totally a part of who I am.
We all love to complain, and we all complain about what we love. Recently one of my classmates telephoned me to vent his frustration at the impossible volume of reading we were assigned for just one class. In order to accomplish the Herculean task of studying and absorbing hundreds of pages of new theory, technique, and case material, my friend tries to get a head start of about a week, when the readings first appear in his mailbox at the institute. This, mind you, is in addition to more than fifty hours of clinical work, five hours of class time, and several hours of teaching, supervision, and personal analysis he puts in each week, as well as running a business and a home and supporting a spouse. Another of my classmates prefers to leave her studying until right before class each week, squeezing in a few sweet hours of reflection between demands of children and husband, extended family, hospital and clinical work, community and church. I take yet a different road, studying a bit most days, burning the candle at both ends some days and letting the wax collect into a recyclable puddle on my desk.
Living a candidate's life is a peculiar cross between work and play. The work part is often thankless because our patients are frequently in treatment for a very long time, and we suffer right along with them until their final hour on the couch. A candidate's gruntwork is the required scores of pages of case summaries, evaluations, and scholarly works of varying creativity and acumen. Some of these get accepted, others get critiqued or rejected, but always we keep writing and submitting our own strange kind of analytic poetry. Each of us dreams of the big sugarplum — the final nonfiction work that will bring the recognition of accreditation.
We all sit around the institute's library every Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, drinking coffee, trying to stay alert after a long week. Every week is emotionally exhausting because that's the kind of work we do. We gather at the institute for classes, and to clear out the cobwebs, open the blinds, and blow a fresh breeze through our minds. We feed each other's visions and dreams with new perspectives and ideas, and occasionally with bagels and cream cheese — small, but not simple, pleasures. My classmates and I have all come to our middle years with decades of dedicated education and work and multiple careers behind us. We have come together like this for five years thus far, and I expect we will continue like this indefinitely, for the process has become a way of life.
A couple of years ago a colleague who is also a good friend approached me, curious about what being a psychoanalytic candidate is like. It was very difficult to grasp the experience in the palm of my hand so that she could really see the exact size and shape of it. It isn't something one tries on like a suit, for the tie is never the right color anyway. It felt a little like trying to describe how a solar system is born.
If there were a litmus test for analytic passion, the diagnosis might have been made sooner in my life, but finding my way into this life has been arduous and long. When I turned to a psychoanalytic candidacy after many decades of self-perpetuated formal study and experiential learning, I found that my thoughts became more intricate, my ideas richer, and my range of vision widened. Gradually, my work with patients took on new form and meaning, and I began to see my own edges soften.
Analytic candidates construct their lives and work out of the flotsam and jetsam of previous experience and a lust for reaching beyond the limits of who we think we are. We have few illusions left about what we are facing in living the analytic lives we are choosing. In this age of managed mental health care that does not value relational, in-depth treatments or the space to give and receive them, we are space travelers, still trying to go where no man or woman has gone before into the human mind. We are hopeful we can earn a living doing the work we are painstakingly and lovingly learning, but most of us would say it really doesn't matter. I have spent more money on the couch in my office than on the one in my living room at home. I didn't hop on this merry-go-round for the brass ring, but because I love the ride.
My classmates and I started sharing dinner and stories almost from the beginning of our candidate lives, and eventually three of us joined forces and built a work group. To live the candidates life, we created an environment where we could practice the art and science of our profession. We are, above all, a haven for each other during these trying times in which we remain faithful to our professional and personal values, often without much reward.
As psychoanalysts we begin life in the universe of dreams and imagination, and my commitment to a candidate's life has led me in directions I had not before dreamed. I'm not referring to being in training, but to living intensely on the edge, the unpredictable flux of sadness and joy in everyday life, where the candidate analyst practices his or her craft.
Perhaps Goethe said it best:
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. That moment one definitely commits oneself … all sorts of things occur to help one that would never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it now.
Celeste Sinton, M.D., is a candidate at the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute. She has a private practice and works and teaches at Children's Hospital Medical Center. She develops and teaches courses on Women's Midlife Development and Aging through the CPI Extension Division. She is pursuing her interest in clinical writing through the Washington Psychoanalytic Foundation New Directions Program.