Dead Men Walking

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalytic training
• impasse
• countertransference
• intergenerational trauma
• withnessing

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to Suzy Naiburg, Ph.D., MSW, for her feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John R. Paddock

John R. Paddock, Ph.D., ABPP, is a licensed psychologist based in Atlanta, Georgia (see: www.johnrpaddockphd.com). He is Adjunct Professor of Psychology in the Emory University Department of Psychology and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, also at Emory. He teaches courses on the Analyst’s Use of Self and Psychoanalytic Approaches to Psychopathology in the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He is a graduate of the Psychoanalytic Training Program at the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy + Psychoanalysis (ICP+P) in Washington, DC. Dr. Paddock is on the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Inquiry.