I have been captivated by Nina Coltart’s (Citation1992) “Slouching Towards Bethlehem … Or Thinking the Unthinkable in Psychoanalysis” since my first encounter. Intrigued by her use of the slouching beast metaphor from Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” which I love, I found myself pulled in and comforted by her voice. Coltart’s presence on the page is authentic, engaging, conversational. Her voice reflects humility, humor, and respect for what she does not know. And yet Yeats’s images are ominous. Given the late Coltart’s stature as a psychoanalyst and consultant, imagine my relief as a newly minted clinician in midlife when I read, “It is of the essence of our impossible profession that in a very singular way we do not know what we are doing” (Coltart, Citation1992, p. 2), because I often felt that way.
Luckily, my not knowing would never come close to the sense of catastrophe Yeats (Citation1983) evokes in his famous poem, which Coltart quotes in full.
In conceptualizing this issue, I focused on the following paragraph of Coltart’s essay:
The day that one qualifies as an analyst, the analyst that one is going to be is a mystery. Ten years later, we may just about be able to look back and discern the shape of the rough beast – ourselves as analysts in embryo – as it slouches along under the months and years until, its hour come round at last, there is some clearer sense of ourselves as analysts. The process of doing analysis has slowly given birth to an identity which we now more or less recognize as an analyst, or at least the identity which we have become, and are still becoming, which for us approximates to the notion of ‘being an analyst’. This may be very different from that which we long ago had visualized or hoped for. [pp. 2–3]
Curious to know what seasoned analysts of different stripes would say in response to this passage, I invited Annie G. Rogers, David G. Power, Ofra Eshel, Eve Watson, John C. (Jack) Foehl, and Carol B. Levin to write a paper about their experience of “slouching towards Bethlehem” and discerning their shape as the analyst they would become.
In the articles that follow, you will notice common themes – e.g., on being, being with, and becoming; self-perception; Après-coup; not knowing; attention to language; and the orientation of theory. Yet each article is unique, shaped by the writer’s life, sensibilities, and theoretical persuasions.
Throughout “Becoming an Analyst: Après-coup,” Annie G. Rogers reflects on the “rendering of time [that] goes into making an analyst”; nachträglichkeit; desire; listening to language and what’s absent; and much more. The way she lays her paper out on the page creates a sense of openness and draws our attention to the surround. She brings in many voices – of poets, writers, and artists, of Freud and Lacan; presents her own art; draws arcs of thought; circles round, returns, and repeats, enacting the process of becoming. I call this writing enactive (Naiburg, Citation2015), because its form enacts its meaning. It does what it says. It embodies process, creates an experience of the process Rogers describes, and invites us to enter it, reflect, create our own meaning, and play. Her creative process and her becoming and being a “print-maker psychoanalyst” involve “lines that break, scatter, circle, chain, move toward the unknown.” She asks rhetorically, “This is psychoanalysis, is it not?”
In David G. Power’s “On Slouching, Evolving, and Transforming: In Appreciation of Nina Coltart’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem … or Thinking the Unthinkable in Psychoanalysis,’” we are taken on a journey through Coltart’s essay and the history of Power’s becoming an analyst, beginning, he tells us, “with a much-beloved high school English teacher” and her assignment of Hall’s (1954) A Primer of Freudian Psychology. Although the process of coming into his own as an analyst happens gradually and mostly out of awareness, he also identifies a “heralding event” in the consolidation of his analytic identity that occurs almost ten years after graduating. It involves helping to plan an international Bion conference in Boston. So it should come as no surprise that Power attends to the resonance of Coltart’s ideas and Bion’s and the importance of not knowing, not “throwing grappling hooks into the darkness,” and fostering “a capacity to endure what Williams (2010) called ‘fruitful ignorance.’” Picking up from where Coltart leaves off, Power responds to several questions of his own: “How today do we think about these phenomena she calls ‘Beyond Words’ and the clinical techniques these phenomena demand?” “How exactly does the slouching beast of unrepresented experience lumber forward in the intersubjective intimacy of our consulting rooms?” In doing so, he demonstrates how exploring theory is an important part of his own “slouching, evolving, and transforming.”
Without knowing it when writing “‘Out of the Depths I Cry to You’: Into the Dark Unknown Depths — Two-in-Oneness,” Ofra Eshel responds to the questions Power explores toward the end of his article. From the start of her clinical career, being there with a patient and “living an experience t(w)ogether” have been at the heart of her work, and it has allowed her to “be-with” some of the most difficult patients whose inner world is reflected in the chaos and catastrophe Yeats describes. Now thirty years since qualifying as an analyst, Eshel writes about going “beyond recent analytic notions of intersubjectivity and witnessing to more radical patient-analyst deep-level interconnectedness or ‘withnessing’ that may grow into at-one-ment or being-in-oneness with the patient’s innermost experience.” Within her article, Yaron Gilat, M.D., offers a clinical example that Eshel discusses, walking us through what it means to be-with a patient in the dark of unknowing in such a deep, transformational way. Of Gilat and his patient, Eshel writes, “They thought, experienced, heard, and talked each other into being.”
In “Being an Analyst: A Journey of Outsidership, Topology, and Time,” Eve Watson welcomes the questions that are constantly raised in psychoanalytic clinical practice: “to think and rethink, to figure and reconfigure my place in the transference and the ways in which we dwell in language.” Watson explores the import of contexts in her analytic journey: the “outsidership [that] has characterized generations of my family and featured in its Irish (Catholic), English (Protestant), American, and Canadian branches through the effects of immigration, emigration, and exile”; psychoanalysis in Ireland; the influences of Freud and Lacan; and her well-honed sensitivity to language. “Speech, riven with the unsayable as well as the not-yet-said, can never capture the real of death, sex, love, trauma, even the very nature of being. While outside of or beyond symbolization, the real is nonetheless within language in the gaps when we speak, in the voids between signifiers where being resides and subjectivity fades to.”
In “Lived Depth: A Phenomenology of Psychoanalytic Process and Identity,” John C. (Jack) Foehl draws a parallel between a “phenomenological perspective in which subject, world, and others are given in one stroke, part of the same emergent process” and the formation of an analytic identity in which “inchoate shifts in meaning and investment that we cannot know in formation come clear in relation to a coalescing sense of our place in a professional context.”
Looking retrospectively at himself as a young therapist in a working-class neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Foehl “learned how psychological dis-ease is something intersubjective, never lived in isolation even though it is often experienced as profoundly isolating.” He also learned how “psychological pathos and progress always take place in a set of contexts. I had a nascent sense that experience in the setting of psychotherapy recapitulates experience of other contexts, that these contexts can be actively explored in therapy, that change happens through a process of contexts changing in the present.” Tracing his development between then and now, Foehl highlights the continental philosophy that shapes his phenomenological perspective and illustrates it by describing his felt sense of the subtle microshifts in the analytic field with his patient Yousef.
In “How Did It Happen? Writing—A Royal Road to Becoming/Being an Analyst (Through the Lens of Complexity Theory),” Carol B. Levin sees her creation as an analyst through the lens of the clinical papers she wrote in the ten years after graduating. Her writing depicts her shaking off the constraints of her “analytic training that left her feeling insecure.” She embraced self psychology and complexity theory and felt “more affirmed as, oh my, a genuine analyst” not only through clinical practice but also through writing, teaching, supervising, and her editorial positions on this journal and Self, Psychoanalysis and Context. Along with telling us specifically how writing has influenced her development as an analyst, Levin describes her work with Tom, “a brilliant, talented and depressed twenty-seven-year-old gay virgin,” to illustrate how she works analytically and how “‘My’ experience and theory give me the confidence to say the things I do to Tom, in the often not-traditional way I do.”
As these six analysts aptly demonstrate by writing the personal narratives that follow, we sense the shape of the analyst we are becoming only in hindsight. And yet in a present moment, these analysts create themselves in the act of writing, as the late Toni Morrison (Citation2019) asserts: “Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created” (p. 108).
Suzi Naiburg, Ph.D., LICSW
Issue Editor
References
- Coltart, N. (1992). Slouching towards Bethlehem…. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
- Morrison, T. (2019). The source of self-regard: Selected essays, speeches, and meditations. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
- Naiburg, S. (2015). Structure and spontaneity in clinical prose: A writer’s guide for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. New York, NY: Routledge.
- Yeats, W. B. (1983). The second coming. In Finneran, R. J. (Ed.), The poems: A new addition (p. 187). New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company.