35. On Being a Psycho-Analyst

It is probably true that the average layman has only a rudimentary and fallacious idea of what a psycho-analyst is and does. If so, the fault is possibly partly the analyst's for using esoteric language, and partly the layman's for believing the language to conceal supremely important knowledge economically available only to the few and so envied and disparaged. As this idea, if really held, must be damaging to analysis, my aim in this paper is to correct it - and incidentally to clarify my own mind, or rather the part of it which is still a layman. It is true of course that the analyst does know more than the layman about what is generally unconscious. But a moment's reflection will convince him that, since he knows more than the previous generation of analysts, the next generation is likely to know as much more again. In other words, the knowledge any one generation has is only relatively impressive - or even adequate.

Suppose an analyst in his chair behind a patient on his couch. This is the best position, because if they were facing each other, the purely sensual impression each had of the other could distract them from the ‘psychic impression’. As it is, the analyst can see the clothed patient or imagine, as a medical doctor might, what he looks like unclothed, or inside his body. But as Bion has so often pointed out, what is important to the analyst is his patient's thoughts and feelings, and these cannot be sensed - in fact, they do not belong to the physical world at all but to the psychic one. Nor strictly speaking do the patients' perceptions of objects, though loosely speaking, they are often treated as if they belonged to the physical world.

How then does the analyst perceive them? By ‘projective-identification’, one of those esoteric words supposedly invented to confuse the layman, which in this context, means that he ‘perceives’ something in his patient because he has put it