Candidates are not a homogenous group, and each has a very different, idiosyncratic hero's journey and struggle. According to the writer Joseph Campbell, myths—and perhaps biblical narratives—are not stories that never happened but are, in fact, stories that always happen. My psychoanalytic birth story and its associated labor pains speak to something more universal as well.
I attended a religious high school, which was progressive in some ways. For instance, we learned Greek mythology, took Advanced Placement courses, and were academically well prepared for university. However, we did not learn “heretical” subjects such as evolutionary biology, other than a cursory explanation to satisfy state requirements, paired with theological apologetics. The primacy of the Orthodox perspective was obvious and, in some ways, comforting. I was swaddled within a community that provided a manual to life, cradle to grave, a place to belong, and a clear blueprint for thinking and approaching the unknown. Identification with an orthodoxy furnishes a raft in a chaotic and stormy sea. However, orthodoxies risk becoming stale, overly concrete, and deadening in their efforts to keep everything safe and well understood.
At Columbia University, I fell in love with astronomy: the celestial, the ineffable, the numinous, the mysterious, the wondrous, all bounded by calculations, measurements, and attempts to engage with amazing unanswered questions and discover new frontiers. Astronomy strives toward that which is not yet conscious. I was assured that the department was exclusively populated with atheists. No one was so silly as to believe in God. I wasn't quite sure what to do with that as an Orthodox Jewish girl still trying to hold on to my Orthodox values as I ventured further into the world. I discovered astronomy as an upper junior, too late to pursue it as either a minor or major. But I'm also not sure what I would have done in that world that had clearly no use for a god that I had been raised to believe was omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. It was the first time but certainly not the last that I found myself inhabiting two worlds that had very little use for each other. Two realms that dismiss and deny the power of each other.
While in graduate school, I availed myself of the inexpensive day passes
Elizabeth Diamond, Ph.D., is a perpetual scholar and explorer trained on both the East and West Coasts. She is currently a child and adult psychoanalytic candidate in Los Angeles. Eli treats children, adolescents, adults, and couples in her private practice.
offered to students to attend APsaA's winter meetings. At a discussion group on eating disorders, Dr. Kathryn Zerbe spoke about navigating two worlds that rejected each other: the analytic world, which used to dismiss patients with such concrete somatic symptoms as eating disorders, and the eating disorder world, which dismissed psychoanalysis as an inappropriate form of treatment, preferring instead such “evidence-based” treatments as DBT and the Maudsley method. I was drawn to the way Dr. Zerbe lived on the bridge between two worlds that had little regard for each other. I came to believe that we might nimbly navigate different worlds or models, and in so doing, create new worlds and new models. Perhaps I could shift from a domain of established rules to a domain guided by negotiations. However, new models often cling to the orthodoxies of each contributing tradition. I craved the security of a mainstream approach even as I chafed against it. Tenets provide a tether, an anchor, but can also quickly become a straitjacket and a bind. Ties that contain also constrain.
During my psychoanalytic psychotherapy post-doctoral training at the Wright Institute, Los Angeles, a classmate inquired about the place of the soul in psychoanalysis. I immediately responded that it was the unconscious. I needed psychoanalysis to be able to hold everything, and I needed to step in and defend it from any perceived deficiencies or attacks. It was imperative that it retain its prestige and myth of exceptionalism, even as it was clearly in decline. I had been bred on a steady diet of Jewish exceptionalism, even though religious observance was hardly in fashion.
As I navigated psychoanalytic training, I began to suspect that I had traded one orthodoxy for another. I left one beloved, well-respected but problematic family for another one. Orthodoxies delineate in-groups and out-groups. You belong, you don't belong. You're my people, you're not my people. Stimulated by my internal orthodoxy, I split faculty and potential supervisors into buckets: my kind of analyst…or not. My father is prone to saying that anyone to the right of him is a zealot and anyone to the left of him is an apostate. Internally, I established my psychoanalytic camp and started inviting some to my tent and dismissing others. I disowned my internal zealots and apostates as well as the profound concomitant struggle that needed to be articulated rather than banished and denied. By not informing my family about my training, I protected my internal families from each other for reasons I'm still trying to fully understand. I also sheltered the ideal from my ambivalence, thereby creating a hole inside. What can't be known creates an abyss. We can fall into these chasms or be blinded as we attempt to repudiate them.
Psychoanalysis belongs to the in-between, on the bridge, in the emergent. To that which is growing and not deadened or stale. To that which is alive and enervating.
In analytic training, we play out our own family dynamics in spaces that have their own existing familial dynamics. We, candidates and faculty, assume roles that we are accustomed to from our family systems. We recapitulate well-known battles, even as we come to training in search of new families and hope that, within our new families, we can do things differently. If we are loathe to assert ourselves within our families of origin, we will likely have similar troubles in our institutes. We may blame the institute for not being dissimilar enough to our families, but perhaps we have not grown enough—yet. If we needed to rebel to differentiate in our family, that might be the template we adhere to within institute life. Or perhaps we lean the other way—compelled to try on a role that was denied within our original family. I carried an internal conflict between an orthodoxy inherited from my family and a self-generated heterodoxy. I brought this into my training, and it guided how I approached and interacted with my personal struggles and the Institute. I unconsciously safeguarded my family; that's been my role. Orthodoxies and families provide a place to belong. Yet, we must belong to ourselves before we can belong to anyone or anything else.
I used to jest that I had three major inabilities: I couldn't hail a cab in New York City, crochet a yarmulke (the traditional head covering worn by Orthodox Jewish men), or see the hidden picture in a Magic Eye poster. I couldn't relax my eyes and attention enough to discern the floating shape. I wonder whether five years into analysis, and after three years of training, I might be more successful. Have I begun to develop more of a capacity for Keats's negative capability or Bion's maternal reverie? Will I meet an emergent bud with the gentle and insatiable inquisitiveness a curious child brings to the wild rather than the zeal of a Japanese Ikebana master curating the perfect floral arrangement? Shall I embrace the tendrils of incipient growth with compassion and interest as I watch them break through the concrete? Shall I inculcate a willingness to let the solidity of orthodoxy crumble and break so that new life can germinate?
I have been wildly compelled by assertions that analysis can save lives. My husband insists that vaccines save lives; but analysis saves souls. But what does that mean? In what ways does analysis conserve and regenerate? How
can psychoanalysis save a life? I think it brings vitality, authenticity, spontaneity, aliveness—which necessitate giving up orthodoxies.
Psychoanalysis belongs to the in-between, on the bridge, in the emergent. To that which is growing and not deadened or stale. To that which is alive and enervating. Psychoanalysis saves our lives by putting us in contact with the energy of the emergent, however confusing and complex. Analysis helps us come to life, come to being, come into ourselves with kindness, integrity, compassion, freedom, and vivacity. That is my hope and what I am willing to risk as I try to surrender to the process, as I release my orthodoxies and their concomitant anchors, and dive into the deep, dark unknown while trusting that I will not be adrift but in fact found—or maybe that I will find myself.
It is humbling to recognize how much we do not know, how desperately we cling to control, knowing, and intellect, and how our personal analyses are not merely training requirements or intellectually interesting but, in fact, absolutely necessary and vital. We need our personal analyses to make sense of our training in a deep way as we grapple within internal holes that get revealed and come fully to life.
Neither psychoanalysis nor Orthodox Judaism has all the answers, but at their best each has a tremendous amount to offer. There is a lot available in these traditions if we can resist looking to them for everything or for easy answers. In the crevasses and ocean trenches, there is a lot of meaning to be found. I love psychoanalysis, Judaism, my family, and psychoanalytic training: each has, or will, break my heart. As the poet philosopher David Whyte teaches us, anything that truly matters will break our hearts and leave us hurting, yearning, raw, and open—our professions, our partners, our children, our institutes, our dreams. Psychoanalysis can enable us to survive surging heartbreak. By sharing and enduring heartbreak with our analysts, we can brave despair on our own, including the inevitable anguish caused by our analysts. In analysis, we co-create an ark—an ark of the covenant and a vessel to ride out the flood. We can survive the squall and encounter our internal dove in the bright, clear light of morning, grasping our olive branch as we step into a new and unknown world. This sphere will contain tempests and heartbreak as part of a full, rich, vital life in which continuous growth is possible and available. I hope my analysis and analytic training helps me venture into the wild unknown.