The Analyst's Analyst Within

Lora H. Tessman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134907694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Analyst's Analyst Within is the most illuminating study to date of how psychoanalysts' experiences with their own analysts affect their lives, their loves, and their evolving professional identities. A gifted interviewer with equally gifted interview subjects, Tessman samples different gender combinations and age ranges in showing how the values typifying different eras of psychoanalytic theorizing enter into the meaning and impact of training analyses. Tessman's findings are striking, and they do not end with her discovery of startling differences according to the decade during which a training analysis took place. She also found that neither the theoretical orientation of the training analyst nor his or her technical preferences predicted whether, years later, the analysis would be remembered as satisfying or dissatisfying, as growth promoting or thwarting. Rather, it was the quality of affective engagement that became reliably present, with the figure of the training analyst, inscribed in all his or her particularity, accounting for the perceived sense of a truly productive analytic experience.

Tessman's research program, which encompasses her methodology, her skill as an interviewer, and the wisdom and clarity of thought of her participants, lifts this work well beyond the perfunctory debates about psychoanalytic training that recur in the journal literature. The power of The Analyst's Analyst Within resides in compelling individual narratives in which analysts revisit their own treatment past - and the analyst within - with candor, vividness, and often great poignancy. The result is a book that not only supersedes previous studies of the training analysis but also opens a new vista on how and why analysis works when it works and fails when it fails.

1
Overview

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

—William Faulkner, Light in August

A psychoanalyst was asked how he felt about the termination of his own analysis. His answer was, “In a word, fine. In two words, not fine!” The research comprising this book explores the worded and wordless in such layers of “fine” and “not fine.” Empirical data about how analysis is experienced by the analysand have been sparse. A barely tapped resource lies in what psychoanalysts discover—what “memory believes”—when they recall their intrapsychic experience of their own analysts over time.

A number of questions have intrigued me about how one’s analyst remains memorable over time after termination, and these questions form the basis for each of the topics explored in this book: How is the analyst remembered differently when an analysis has been deeply satisfying from when it is experienced as beneficial, but with major limitations, or from when, in retrospect, it is judged to be highly unsatisfactory and even damaging? What surmised attributes of the analyst are viewed as linked to the potential for or the obstacles to mutative change? How do the analysand’s conjectures about the analyst’s view of him or her affect what is internalized and what is memorable about the analysis? How does the gender of the analyst and analysand, housed in like or unlike bodies of desire, affect what transpires between them? What changes in how the analyst is experienced intrapsychically take place over time after termination, and why might these changes matter? How does posttermination contact, or its absence, acquire meanings that affect future developments in positive or negative ways? How are analyses influenced by the sociocultural context of a Psychoanalytic Institute as representative of prevalent theory and practice? The research I describe aims to illuminate these questions rather than to test specific hypotheses.

My interest in these issues led me to talk with a sample of 34 analysts (30 members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and four from other parts of the country) about how their own analyst became memorable in ways that have made themselves felt over postanalytic time. My primary concern was not with training per se, but was—and is—to explore the processes of remembered engagement and internalization as general phenomena. Nevertheless, issues derived from the training context also could be expected to make their presence felt.

I wanted to note differences that might correlate with the decade during which the training analysis took place, that is, while paradigms in theory and practice were changing. I also wanted to sample each of the four possible gender combinations. Thus, sample selection was based on the variations in time and gender. An additional salient dimension is the unique dynamic within each particular analytic dyad. For the study of qualities related to the particularity of each analytic dyad, comparison pairs of two kinds were constituted: pairs of two analysts for the same analysand and pairs of two analysands for the same analyst. Of the 34 Participants in the research, 28 had two or more analyses. There were six instances in which two Participants had shared the same analyst. The Participants portrayed a total of 64 analyses, and the sample comprised 11 training analysts and 23 non-training analysts.

The research was designed around internal rather than external validity, namely, the subjective judgments of the Participants about their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their analyses, the ingredients that went into those judgments, and the consequences of the experience. By external criteria, such as the opinion of a spouse or Rorschach scores, the value of the analysis might be judged differently. Verification about whether the analyst felt toward the analysand as he or she was portrayed was also not attempted. I now briefly introduce some considerations that shaped the research process and the theoretical controversies in which it was couched and then proceed to preview the parts of the book that follow.

Embarking on the research forced me to struggle with a number of quandaries in methodology: I had found myself attracted to what might be learned about the analytic process by talking to analysts about their own experience, a population unique in having experienced analysis from two positions, on the couch and behind the couch. This population is probably distinctive in other ways as well, such as having a penchant for introspection, the urge to articulate what is usually unspoken, some familiarity with anguish, a belief in the possibility of change, and the myriad motivations that led them to choose psychoanalysis as a career. Any distinctive sample calls for care in what the generalizations are about.

The choice of analysts as the study population also had the disadvantage of some stringent restrictions, which I considered worth their yield. Privacy and confidentiality were essential for the Participants, as well as for the analysts portrayed in their recollections. Protective measures are spelled out in the letter of invitation to the Participant (Appendix A). Nobody knew who was a Participant unless the person chose to divulge it. Several people stated that if anyone else—with the exception of the secretary who transcribed the tapes—would have access to the material, they would not be willing to participate. The secretary, who later became a research assistant, had to be someone with no current or likely future connection to psychoanalysis. Participant was sent his or her transcript for consent and to edit out passages that were not to be quoted. One eloquent Participant asked that the total narrative of his analyses be sealed. Of course, material vetoed for public quotation was not lost to the research findings, because it was still tabulated and counted in the aggregate comparisons of categories. Participants were invited to make up their own pseudonyms. The tapes, with possibly recognizable voices, were destroyed once transcribed. Although I was surprised that Participants rarely vetoed quotations, there are a variety of specific instances in which they did, including charged comments about Institute politics and ambience, about colleagues or supervisors, about certain revealing aspects of family background, about particular fantasies associated with shame, or about criticisms of their analysts that they feared might cause hurt feelings. There was also reluctance to release certain passages for a very different reason—namely, a sense of privacy about precious interchanges with the analyst during periods of profound erotic feelings. I agree that privacy is an essential component of such erotic experience and that public display might alter it in some way. Therefore, I opt to limit some of its elaboration, generally, in these accounts. Most of the excerpts quoted here appear under the pseudonym of the Participant to allow for cross-referencing of material about that person. When a Participant preferred delinking a particular quotation from the pseudonym, the citation is given anonymously from “an analyst.”

To further protect anonymity, presented excerpts are primarily process material (although parts of excerpts may be edited, summarized, or juxtaposed to different sections of the interview). Biographical details are kept to a minimum. I concur with Gabbard’s (2000) recent writings on “Disguise or Consent” that biographic detail is more revealing than process material. I noticed, however, that certain recognizable details about the analysts portrayed were nonetheless earmarked with consent for presentation. In such cases, I let the Participants choose what would be divulged rather than let my sense of discretion trump theirs. Among the hidden pleasures of citing the narratives in a form as close to verbatim as possible might be this: I often feel moved by exactly how a patient communicates, so deeply emblematic of his or her essence, but of course I can’t act on my urge to share it with others. Preserving the Participants’ voices may gratify the same urge. When people wanted their message to remain undisguised, I was mindful of Winnicott’s adage that “it is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found” (1963, p. 186).

A further reason for preserving the experience-near process material lies in its potential use as raw data for others to come to their own, perhaps different conclusions.

I chose to focus largely on Participants who are fellow members of the same Institute because I came to feel that the accretion of views, for instance, of Participants who had the same analyst and who shared the same history of Institutional practices, added more than it lost. Involving colleagues meant that I considered them to be Participants rather than research subjects. Without a frame for working through such issues, I did not want to include personality measures or attachment interviews or ask for self-described categories of character problems, which might have eventuated in Participants’ self-criticisms or self-assigned diagnostic categorizations, potentially adding needless iatrogenic factors to whatever issues of self-esteem were already operant. There is enough of that in Psychoanalytic Institutes already. Nevertheless, references to diagnoses made their appearance. For instance, several women made asides such as, “being a good hysteric, I reacted this way,” and several men referred to their ex-wives as “definitely borderline.” While ignoring the question of diagnoses, it did, however, seem relevant to reflect on the role of a quotidian attitude, namely, the Participant’s theory of thought, an emotionally charged belief about whether one’s own thinking is primarily dyadically or autoevoked. This variable, associated with other traits, bears on how termination is metabolized, because it involves moving from dyadic communication to the soliloquy of self-analysis.

The taped interviews lasted between 2 and 8 hours per Participant according to the Participant’s choice of how much there was to be said. They included both spontaneous narrative and responses to 13 lines of open-ended questions. The questions are included in the letter to Participants in Appendix A. In approaching the interviews, a priority was to provide a context that might maximize communicative freedom for candid personal responses in some depth. The interviews, planned in two-hour segments when possible, usually opened with an unstructured narrative about each of the Participants’ analysts, which tended to last at least through the first session, followed by those questions that had not been responded to spontaneously. The conversations were not begun with the questions because it seemed important that the material be cast in the Participants’ metaphors rather than in my own. The questions had been sent to the Participants before the interview, however, to allow for the development of associations over time, rather than privileging instant reactions. One aim was to evoke the momentum of memory in such a way that the Participant would have the possibility, if so inclined, to make self-analytic use of whatever emerged.

I was to learn that most of the Participants had either two analyses or another extended therapy with an analyst. Whether the second treatment came before or after the training analysis was about evenly divided. That the absence of a second analytic experience did not necessarily signify satisfaction in the aftermath of the first was highlighted by the finding that the proportion of Participants who felt their analysis was unsatisfactory was highest within the minority who never returned to another analytic experience. I have come to regard second analyses as denoting an affinity for analytic process and its yield, rather than dissatisfaction with a first experience.

Each Participant’s narrative in toto, as well as the response to each of the 13 lines of questions, was grouped by degree of retrospective satisfaction with the analysis, by gender combination, and by the decade during which the analysis took place. The interaction of those distributions is summarized separately for the total number of analyses described and for training analyses specifically. These findings are found in Appendix C. Their elaboration in the form of excerpts from the narratives can be found throughout the book.

It became evident that a crucial dimension of the Participants’ recalled experiences were based in their feelings about how the analyst experienced them. Commonalties in each of the three categories of satisfaction did not reside in specific behaviors or techniques of the analyst (such as amount of silence, self-disclosure, interpretation of defense or of the transference), but rather in the meanings attributed to the affective messages through which interpretations and other interchanges with the analyst took place. The presentation of the findings revolves around such meanings.

The conversations with Participants did not purport to assess the veridical experience of the past analysis, that is, what “actually” happened. My working assumption was that the historical encoding of the past is affected by the mind-set of the present, but that affective memories evoked about the analyst express important influences on the present. Any time period chosen for study during or after analysis has its singular features. A retrospective view of the analyst reflects a choice to highlight the dynamics of memory in current experience. It takes into account the observation that the analysis is far from over when it ends, that postanalytic developments occur in the wake of what the actual analysis has started. Changes in retrospective satisfaction, and in associated views of the analyst, occur over long time spans. Guntrip (1975) advised: “Analysts are advised to be open to post-analytic improvements, so presumably we do not expect ‘an analysis’ to do a ‘total’ once for all job. We must know about post-analytic developments if we are to assess the actual results of the primary analysis” (p. 145).

The Participant’s memories, with whatever highlighting of meaning, emphasis, or evaluation may have been set into motion during the interviews or in prior self-analysis, thus stand in a parallel relation to a more familiar phenomena, namely, the constant retranscription of childhood memories by the time they emerge within the transference-countertransference context of analysis. In general, it is this constellation of desires, adaptations, and self-protective compromises from childhood, already retranscribed (or having resisted retranscription lest there be retraumatization), that make up the issues brought to treatment. There are, of course, also important differences between parent and analyst as remembered, because much of the impact of early childhood experience acquires its patterns of organizing anticipations from times when the psychic organizers of affects, with their associated metaphoric, embodied imagery, are nonverbal. Still, the changing balance in the controversies over the past five decades about the analyst’s contribution to verbal and nonverbal enacted communication seems reflected in the following: In many analyses of earlier decades, in addition to whatever transference phenomena were interpreted and discussed, a pattern of enactment of unconscious expectations from early relationships seemed to dominate the affective ambiance of the analysis, apparently without at that time any articulation by either the analyst or analysand. Nonetheless, the therapeutic action or disaction of these analyses decades ago seems to have hinged on the dynamic in these patterns. To attempt to illuminate the impact of both what was said and what was enacted without being said, this study explored how the Participants linked their views of the analyst’s role as actualized in communication, with the eventual sense of benefit and satisfaction with the analysis.

In the psychoanalytic ambiance of today, there is great diversity in formulations about therapeutic action. Some emphasize that the analysis of ego resistance through which the analyst helps the analysand observe in the self what was previously taboo allows for a reduction of intrapsychic conflict and defense, permitting parts of the self previously unknown to be integrated (Gray, 1973, 1986, 1990; Weinshel, 1992; Busch, 1995). Others (Loewald, 1960, 1962, 1979; Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983; Hoffman, 1983, 1996; Mitchell, 1988) underscore the impact of the new object relationship established with the analyst. For example, Fonagy (1999) holds that “psychic change is a function of a shift of emphasis between different mental models of object relationships.” He proposes further that “the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis is unrelated to the recovery of memories of childhood, be these traumatic or neutral.” In this connection he argues explicitly that “the experiences contributing to representations of object relations will have occurred mostly too early to be remembered, that is in the conscious sense of experiencing recovering a past experience in the present” (p. 216). With regard to the potential implications for technique, Joseph (1981) noted that “interpretations dealing only with the individual associations would touch only the more adult part of the personality, while the part that is really needing to be understood is communicated though the pressures brought on the analyst” (p. 448).

If the analyst engages with the analysand in mutative responses to such early and unmentalized anticipations, the process may call forth a different range of skills, satisfactions, and limitations than if the analyst’s primary role is that of interpreter of repressed impulse with its layering of defense and transference attitudes. Analogously, if the analyst’s own transferences are viewed as playing a role in the analytic interchange, then his or her involvement is imbued in a positive way with potential for changes in the analyst, but this opportunity also confers an added, perhaps disturbing, responsibility to acknowledge that not every turbulence in the analytic relationship stems from the patient’s “projective identification.” Once engaged, the affective meanings of an analyst’s communication will affect the alchemy between the analysand’s reexperience of the past in the present and the hope for pursuing a more satisfying future.

Deeming the nature of the analyst to figure importantly in how the analysis is experienced rests on a premise, among others, of the beneficial interplay of the fantasies and the actuality of the analyst. Freud depicted psychoanalysis as “conversations” rather than as soliloquies of free association. He said of the patient-analyst couple, “Nothing takes place between them except that they talk to each other” (1926, p. 187). So he assumed that interchange between two individuals could create an effect. But because he saw fantasy as distorting and leading away from reality, fantasy had to be renounced for reality to be accepted. To my mind, this goal would constrict, mute, or deaden the freedom for fantasies that vitalize play, love, and work. I prefer to concur with Loewald’s (1975) assertion:

Reality testing is far more than an intellectual or cognitive function. It may be understood more comprehensively as the experiential testing of fantasy—its potential and suitability for actualization—and the testing of actuality—its potential for encompassing it in, and penetrating it with, one’s fantasy life. We deal with a task of reciprocal transposition

[p. 368].

I believe that the analyst is experienced as that crucially tested “actuality” for retranscribing intrapsychic realities that have been fore-closed. The alchemy between the analyst as subjectively created object and his or her “actuality” as evoked by the particular analysand is key. What is meant by the analyst’s actuality? Webster’s defines actual as “being in existence or action now.” During analysis, the actuality of the analyst involves those expressions of self that emerge in relation to the particular analysand, selectively evoked by who and what the analysand brings. Thus, the analyst is actually different with different patients. Fonagy et al. (1995) believe that the way the capacity for self-reflective mentation and for understanding mental states of the other develops is that “the child gets to know the caretaker’s mind as the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Overview
• 2 Conversations and Process
• 3 Satisfaction and the Analyst
• 4 In the Mind’s Eye
• 5 Gendered Desires: An Introduction
• 6 Women with Male Analysts
• 7 Men with Male Analysts
• 8 Men with Female Analysts
• 9 Women with Female Analysts
• 10 Theories of Thought
• 11 The Training Context
• 12 Evolving Identity as Analyst
• 13 Analysis Ending and Unending
• 14 Mourning
• 15 Leave-Taking
• 16 Self-Analysis
• 17 Dilemmas of Posttermination Contact
• 18 The Analyst Imagined
• 19 Concluding Reflections: The Future of a Collusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• References
• Index