Professional Value of Reanalysis

COPE Study Groups are dedicated to expanding and disseminating understanding of important areas in psychoanalytic education. Our Study Group on Reanalysis (Dan Brener, Stan Coen, Helene Keable, Mel Lansky, Gunther Perdigao, Al Robbins, Eslee Samberg, Christine Ury, Joan Wexler, and this writer) is interested in taking advantage of the natural laboratory of reanalysis to understand analytic process. Beyond that broad interest, we specifically contextualize reanalysis as part of the most significant educational experiences of the analyst: the often career-long exposures to personal analyses in addition to the training analysis. We are exploring the contributions of analysis and reanalysis to psychoanalytic careers, clinical skills, professional immersion, and educational commitments.

The fact that analytic candidates are required to undergo the field's most powerful treatment method in their training analyses is unique in clinical education. It is necessitated in our “impossible profession” by the need for the analyst to be not only the agent but also the instrument of change. Beginning with “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” however, it has been recognized that the training analysis may be insufficient to accomplish those ends. In fact, Freud suggested that analysts be periodically reanalyzed without feeling ashamed, noting that even a good, completed analysis cannot necessarily be expected to endure because of defenses and systematic resistances, passages in life, evolution of experience, and changes in the balance of sublimations—not to mention the “dangers” of stirring up the analyst's own instinctual demands and conflicts by regular immersion in patients' material. The fact that training analyses have become more thorough since Freud's day cannot eliminate the complexity imposed by the uneasy melding of therapeutic and educational goals, or the vicissitudes of an analytic career.

Although it may sometimes appear that Freud's recommendations have been honored largely in the breach, that appearance is misleading. Two or more analyses are actually far from rare. The training analysis is required, recognized, openly acknowledged, and is, in many ways, a public procedure in all but content. Other analytic experiences, by contrast, are not required, not recognized, kept private, and therefore appear less common than they are. If asked, analysts who have had additional analytic exposure will acknowledge it, and even swear by its benefits, but the subject is largely absent from clinical considerations, informal and formal education, and the literature. Nonetheless, suggestive data from studies and ad hoc surveys bridging 30 years indicate that about two-thirds of analysts have had more than one analysis—and sometimes multiple analyses. It appears that about half of the group with more than one analysis (one-third of the total) was analyzed prior to beginning training, so that the additional analytic exposure was in a sense preparatory, and the other half was reanalyzed after the completion of training. To designate those two categories, we have referred to them as “preanalysis” and “reanalysis,” respectively.

We have tried to understand the factors that either lead from preanalysis to training or from a training analysis to later reanalysis. We remain less than certain about those factors, but it is clear that repeated exposure to analysis is predicated on having a satisfactory first analytic experience. While we had hoped that those who were dissatisfied with their first experience might return for a better one, it does not seem to be the case. For those who do have more than one analysis, our preliminary observations indicate that a benefit of repeated exposure is access to greater psychic depth. In that vein, by far the strongest area of preliminary agreement in our study group was that reanalysis after a training analysis was characterized by a greater regression with more powerful transferences, previously unknown levels of anxiety, the recovery of object representations from earliest development, access to primitive affective states, and profoundly re-experienced losses and narcissistic injuries. Our impression is that such an investment in continuing education tends to pay off in terms of work that is less doctrinaire, more attuned, lively, and vital without being wild, and solidly based in analytic process. We are continuing to work to refine our observations, questions, and hypotheses.

Although not usually a part of COPE activities, our group is seriously considering developing a research protocol to get better data on such simple questions as the prevalence of multiple analytic exposures among analysts. It is the strong impression of the COPE group that the training analysis as both necessary and sufficient for most analysts is incorrect, but we do not reliably know the actual frequency of multiple analyses. We do not underestimate the complexity of the questions and are in consultation with a BOPS science advisor to see what might be designed.

Finally, we have taken seriously the mandate to make our findings available. One paper from our group, “Reanalysis in the Career of the Psychoanalyst,” which I co-authored with Nancy Debbink, was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis, 12(1), and another paper I wrote on “Training Analysis and Reanalysis in the Development of a Psychoanalyst,” will appear in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 55/4 (2007).

We not only hope to be a resource for educators and other analysts but also are very interested in input. Please send your observations, comments, and ideas to: .