For all our concern about the changing nature of analytic practice, we may fail to appreciate the untarnished privileges of our profession. Many of us are solely—or mainly—self-employed, at work that commands a living wage (or at least, half of one), in 40 hours a week or less. We can adjust work commitments to the needs of our growing families, reducing hours when children are young or a parent's health fails and adding them as family demands diminish. We are largely free to set our own schedules, around our families' needs.
This does not mean we manage “work-family balance” without conflict; surely, we do not. We may imagine colleagues' disapproval for any sacrifice of career to family life; sometimes, there is a grain of reality to this concern. We may know that work will restore self-esteem threatened by our first, clumsy forays into new parenthood; at the same time, we may be acutely aware of infants' needs for their parents. We may worry that the hours we spend with patients will translate, years hence, into hours our children spend in treatment, reconstructing the harm wrought by our beloved work lives. Like any other form of personal conflict, this one—the analyst's own struggle with “work-family balance,” in both its external and internal forms—can benefit our work with patients, if we make good use of it. A distinctly analytic perspective on work and family life may have utility beyond the consulting room, as well.
Much classic analytic literature assumes the full-time presence of a mother, at home with young children, in context of a two-parent, single-earner household. The current realities of both paid work and family life call this basic assumption into question and add new concerns. As analysts, we know some things about what children and their parents need. What can we say about the interface between work and family life, in a world of busy, dual-career families, single-parent households, and family poverty? How do we think about our patients' increasingly common presenting complaint, concerning work-family balance? Are such conflicts any different, in quality, from others we encounter in treatment? Given how we think about the needs of working parents and their children, how might we hope to influence law and public policy?
In this special section of TAP, we explore the contemporary experience of work-family conflict on multiple levels, ranging from the large-scale, political and socioeconomic conditions in which we and our patients operate to the idiographic particulars that draw our attention in clinical work.
In this special section of TAP, we explore the contemporary experience of work-family conflict on multiple levels, ranging from the large-scale, political and socioeconomic conditions in which we and our patients operate to the idiographic particulars that draw our attention in clinical work.
Ellen Galinsky, a nationally recognized expert on work and family issues, gives an overview of the changing American workforce, workplace, and family, and outlines findings from a large-scale study exploring children's responses to current conditions of work and family life. Anne Dailey, a law professor with deep interest in and knowledge of our field, explores the implications of psychoanalytic developmental theory for law and public policy regarding work and family life. Psychoanalyst Leon Hoffman writes, from the perspective of his role as director of the Pacella Parent Child Center of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, about a broad program of therapeutic outreach to working parents and their children. I describe a multiple case study, reported fully in a recent issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly (2007:76), that explores women's experience of conflict around work and motherhood.
As analysts, we have much to learn from colleagues outside our discipline about the interface of work and family life (as well as a great many other things) and also much to offer in return.
The authors of this special section of TAP would like to thank the APsaA Program Committee for featuring their work in a symposium of the same title at the 2006 Winter Meeting.