People Are Not Cabbages: Reflections on Patient and Analyst Change

Abstract

The author describes how her own internal change was a vital part of transformation between herself and two patients. She draws on Loewald’s work as she discusses how change in her own internal relationship with her father was part of a lifelong emotional reorganization of oedipal relations. She describes a process of mutual change whereby her and her patients’ unconscious growth each stimulated the other. She suggests that the analyst’s own emotional growth is a vital, not an incidental, part of psychoanalysis, as it brings new life to the work for patients as well as analysts themselves.

• Analysts’ change
• analysts’ dreams
• Loewald
• alcoholism
• fathers
• dreaming
• spontaneity
• transference
• mothers
• lifelong development
• oedipal complex
• internalization
• fantasy