The Psychoanalyst’s Analysis and Reanalysis
Motivations to becomes a psychoanalyst
Individuals who seek to become psychoanalysts are usually motivated by a deep wish to help other people, that stems from a desire to understand and help themselves.
With few exceptions, psychoanalysts, and therapists from all schools of psychotherapy, will have had early life experiences that have made them suffer beyond the common and tolerable developmental frustrations. The pain those experiences created led them to dedicate significant mental resources to reflect on their suffering in order to attenuate it.
This is both a boon and a bane for all psychotherapists, a double-edged sword that can be skillfully deployed to therapeutic advantage and/or represent a serious hindrance. Many schools of psychotherapy acknowledge this to some degree, but psychoanalysis is, by far, the school that has most deeply recognized the ambivalence associated to the motivation to become a psychoanalyst, and the need to address it seriously. It cannot be sidestepped.
Making a virtue of necessity
Having experienced emotional suffering beyond one's development capacity to process it can have many different outcomes, ranging from tragic mental illness to mild symptoms and slight relational handicaps. Most outcomes lie somewhere in between, depending on the events, when they happened, for how long, who one could turn to, and the individual’s inborn resilience.
On some occasions, however, emotional suffering can also lead a person to become uniquely sensitive and empathic to other people’s suffering, to have an intuitive understanding of the irrational aspects of the mind, to be a naturally good listener, and to be emotionally honest, because they themselves have been confronted with some hard truths. These are the people who will be attracted to the healing professions, often some form of psychotherapy, and these positive attributes, which paradoxically have been enhanced by the bad experiences, are essential to being a good psychoanalyst.
Specific challenges
The virtues, however, come at a price: the bad experience, which will inevitably have led, to a greater or lesser degree, to overly defensive aspects of the psychoanalyst’s personality structure and non-beneficial relational patterns. Almost invariably, those who wish to become psychoanalysts or psychotherapists are wounded themselves.
If these wounds are not thoroughly addressed, they will get in the way of being an effective clinician: they will stake out large unconscious blind spots in one’s listening, things one cannot pick up on; they will produce difficulties in separating out one’s problems from patients’ problems; they can lead one to be overly reliant on patients for positive reinforcement, hence avoiding important negative affects; they can make it difficult to maintain a neutral, firm and benevolent therapeutic attitude; they can fill one with feelings of inadequacy and guilt or, worse, cynical indifference; they can foster unrealistic treatment expectations or bitter defeatism; they can mutate a profession dedicated to healing suffering into a tool to make oneself suffer, and sooner or later they will engender some form of therapeutic burn-out.
How to address the challenges
Psychoanalysts recognized these risks very early on, and established the personal psychoanalysis of the future psychoanalyst as the one of the bedrocks of training, the occasion to carefully work through one’s difficulties to improve one’s own life and to be able to helpfully take on the highly subtle and ever-changing emotional dynamics between patient and psychoanalyst that develop with psychoanalytic work.
No matter how naturally talented one might be, one cannot help or understand others deeply until one has been helped and understood deeply by someone else. Due to psychoanalysis’s experience with this, many psychotherapists from different schools also seek personal psychoanalysis for themselves, even if they do not practice psychoanalysis itself.
Psychoanalysts’ essential tools are their own minds and their knowledge. The knowledge is acquired through years of study and accumulated clinical experience, about which much could be said but in another place. The psychoanalyst’s mind, with all its inherent skills and limitations, is refined through personal analysis and supervision, in order for it to become a fine-tuned instrument able to resonate with the patient, thus offering otherwise inaccessible insight into the patient’s mind.
The story does not end there, however.
Due to the nature of their work, and the wide variety of patients they work with, psychoanalyst’s personal analyses need to be deeper and broader than those of someone who is not a mental health professional, mainly for two reasons.
Ongoing professional development
The first reason is that, although the goal of any psychoanalysis is for it to be deeply transformative and help someone live a much more satisfactory life, for a patient who is also a psychoanalyst it can only offer one personal experience of a theoretical-clinical view of psychoanalysis.
Contemporary psychoanalysis is characterized by a vast, rich and sometimes confusing theoretical pluralism, each theory focused on and illuminating different aspects of the mind. Although it is very helpful to study these theories and incorporate them into one’s thinking, it is quite another thing to experience their clinical application personally. No matter how capable or wise one psychoanalyst may be, he or she cannot offer all the wealth of meaningful self-knowledge that comes from the skilled clinical application of these theories by himself or herself.
While it would probably be impossible to have meaningful personal analyses with analysts from all the different contemporary schools of psychoanalysts, it is tremendously enriching, both personally and clinically, to at least have a few different experiences. They temper idealizations of any one school, offer fresh perspectives for thought and feeling on old issues, address inevitable blind spots in previous analyses, and breathe new life into the process.
Having an extensive and profound experience of the mind, from several different angles, that have actually meant something personally, and led to beneficial change, is the psychoanalyst’s greatest asset. No single psychoanalysis can offer that.
Occupational hazards
The second reason psychoanalyst’s personal analyses need to be deeper and broader than those of someone who is not a mental health professional is that all the healing professions, psychoanalysis included, come with the occupational hazard of being consistently exposed to the suffering of others, and how this affects them. Although some professions try to deny this, since it threatens an image of oneself as an all-powerful savior ––some medical doctors, for instance, who yearn to save lives and are yet regularly confronted with death–– none are exempt from this reality.
How does this specifically affect psychoanalysts? Well, psychoanalysts need both to be able to keep a professional distance and let themselves be genuinely affected by their patients in order for the work to not simply be an intellectual exercise. This is a very difficult balance to achieve, never permanently acquired, it’s a constantly moving equilibrium that changes with each patient and each session… and daily exposure to others’ suffering will tend to reactivate one’s own suffering.
This is the paradox of the analyst’s mind: in order to be flexible and effective it must be open to the widest range of thoughts and emotions, but that very openness also makes it vulnerable.
Everyone’s mind instinctively defends itself from suffering and, in so doing, it reduces its ability to experience. Psychoanalysts spend years during their personal analysis, in or before training, broadening and deepening their range, hopefully significantly improving their own lives and enabling them to understand their patients deeply. But this rarely offers them permanent immunity. Regular work with patients, and life experiences, can, over time, stiffen certain areas of the mind (or make them too loose), can create comfortable and well-known ruts, narrow one’s focus to avoid thorny issues, as well as reduce one’s curiosity and wish to discover. This will negatively affect the psychoanalyst’s work.
Reanalysis
Ongoing supervision, intervision and consultation with colleagues, as well as dedicated reading and study are very helpful, but sometimes they are not enough, and reanalysis is necessary. It is not unusual that, after having undergone rigorous training and a long first personal psychoanalysis, the need for reanalysis is a disappointing prospect for some psychoanalysts, that fractures an illusion of having enduringly acquired a skill, a skill that now seems to be less available.
At the beginning of psychoanalysis, Freud warned that psychoanalysis was an impossible profession and suggested reanalysis every five years. Psychoanalyses were very short back then, and as they deepened and lengthened, some sectors of the profession believed that one long analysis would be enough, creating the ideal of someone who is “fully analyzed”. This may be the case for some psychoanalysts, or it may be reassuring to believe so, but others have come to humbly accept that the impossible profession requires, at different stages of one’s career, reanalysis in order to be constantly becoming an analyst.
Psychoanalysts aspire to have deep hearts and sharp minds, but these qualities are never fully captured, they must be consistently worked towards.