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doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2193533pmid: N/A
This article encompasses remarks I have made over the years at the graduation of candidates completing the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ICP+P). On the threshold of this milestone, I focus on the importance of the connection to one’s professional, relational home, the influences that shape an analyst’s developmental trajectory, and the evolution of a personal idiom, using examples from the work of Norman Rockwell and Pablo Picasso. I draw attention to the inhibitory impact of shame on a candidate’s development.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2193534pmid: N/A
This article describes the process of development and discovery of an analytic mind, identity, and voice. This is seen through the author’s personal journey during psychoanalytic training and practice. That journey, like that of many candidates, begins with a sense of curiosity and “not knowing enough” which then propels the candidate into a search for certainty. Central to this process is the interaction of one’s personal analysis, supervised clinical practice, and didactic seminars. These become a backdrop that works to free the analyst’s mind in the service of one’s analytic work. The author reflects on her nascent concept of analytic mind and describes it as the potential space in the mind which becomes recognized and developed through analysis and training, giving rise to a new way of thinking, experiencing, and understanding the underlying ambiguous forces that determine human adaptation and distress. The author’s evolving concept of analytic identity is described as an inner sense of one’s self as an analyst, now represented in relation to a shared sense of mind and being part of a theoretical community with a shared history and approach to patient’s struggles. The developing idea of analytic voice is that voice in which we convey our work and express it to ourselves, our peers, and our patients. A voice with a new language that evolved from the analytic mind and identity, and is manifested in a greater capacity to show and communicate with patients and others.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2193536pmid: N/A
As a recent graduate in psychoanalysis, I assert that psychoanalysis has been responsible for a significant transformation in my life – indeed a transcendence over the intended constraints posed by my designated race, gender, and social class. I review my biography in the context of the seismic changes our social structures have continued to experience. My biography is analyzed using eclectic psychoanalytic theories to demonstrate the use of psychoanalysis in the service of personal liberation. Mentalization, as well as, Developmental and Attachment psychoanalytic theories may be used in an emancipatory effort by those currently oppressed or marginalized in our society when trained psychoanalysts are accessible. I believe the history of anti-Black racism is relevant to the psychoanalysis of patients regardless of race. The concept of “Racial Battle Fatigue” will be described and applied to the analysis of myself, a person of African descent.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2193538pmid: N/A
As I write my story of training, integration, graduation, terminating my analysis and continuing transformation, I hope to show that becoming an analyst is a non-linear developmental process. If it goes well enough, resistances are tenderized, their tough tendons become malleable, and the mind becomes better able to absorb the marinade. Our pain and mourning with a safe analyst are the tenderizers. If properly listened to, and cared about, we are better able to acknowledge our ongoing conflicts, test our newfound strengths, and hopefully look back at the panorama where we began. We get good enough help so we can offer good enough help. I offer my story as one way to grow into being a psychoanalyst.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2193540pmid: N/A
In this paper, I reflect on how cultural selfobject experiences shape one’s sense of identity and how contemporary psychoanalysis has evolved in order to recognize the impact of extra psychic factors on emotional development. I use my personal experience as a Jewish, first-generation daughter of immigrants to focus on culture, fantasied whiteness, intergenerational transmission of the trauma of immigration, and the role of dissociation in formation of identity. I also elaborate on how an expanded psychoanalytic theory and practice that includes the socio-cultural as part of the relational field has helped me to understand how these experiences become internalized.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2193541pmid: N/A
In this article, I write of an 11-year odyssey with a patient who despite our best efforts, remained mired in emotional deadness, anomie, and depersonalization. The journey led me to question my core assumptions about co-creating an effective therapeutic alliance as well as my competence as an experienced psychotherapist-psychologist, well-trained in empirically validated treatments. What I realized was a failed treatment, that led me to pursue psychoanalytic training. In the process, I grew to understand that our parallel traumatic life histories, and my inadvertent and unconscious reluctance to acknowledge my own countertransference, kept me from joining with him in the intersubjective experience of profound grief – that which, in retrospect, I believe would have made all the difference in his treatment.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2193542pmid: N/A
Recently, psychoanalysts have begun to write about the ways in which trauma and loss in their lives have affected their work. However, there has been nothing published about that subject in the life of a psychoanalytic candidate. This article is an exploration of the ways in which a family tragedy that occurred during my candidacy affected my psyche, my training, and my work. It was particularly poignant that my trauma reignited issues of trauma and loss in my two analytic cases, both of whom had a history of trauma and loss. The structure and guidance provided by my analysis and supervision during this time were comforting and healing, and enabled me to continue to work confidently with patients.
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