Growing a Psychoanalyst

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalytic training
• candidate
• graduation
• de-idealization
• integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rochelle M. Broder

Rochelle M. Broder, Ph.D., trained and graduated from the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute in 2019 after a career as a graphic designer and a school psychologist. She practices psychoanalysis in Huntington Woods and Royal Oak, Michigan, supervises psychotherapists and psychiatry residents, and is Associate Faculty at the MPI. Upon graduation, Dr. Broder won the Nathan P. Segel Candidate Essay Award and the APsaA Candidate Paper Prize for her graduation paper, “Low Fee, Rage and Countertransference.”