Response to Phillips, Hopkins, and Berman

Abstract

Adam Phillips asks why we need to engage in professional policing. He exceeds my own professional comfort zone when he suggests that a great thing about psychoanalysis is that “it does not necessarily make people better.” I make a plea for a measure of professional idealism that takes account of the analyst's power. In her discussion, Linda Hopkins provides fascinating anecdotes that support my ideas about Masud Khan's analysis. Hopkins also argues for the value of idealization in therapeutic process, noting that I excessively emphasize its problematics. I agree with Hopkins's perspective and muse about why my paper reads otherwise. Emanuel Berman distinguishes institutional from individual idealizations and argues for the value of the latter while underscoring the difference between de-idealization and devaluation. I query the inevitably problematic nature of institutional idealizations.

Notes

¹I've taken up the dynamics of analytic “misdemeanors” elsewhere (Slochower, 2004, 2006).

²Berman picks up on the looseness in my own use of terminology here. In the clinical example of Robin, I describe how she was catapulted out of an intense idealization into a state of “devaluation and de-idealization.” Berman notes that I'm erroneously equating de-idealization and devaluation here. I agree; my use of the term de-idealization was, in fact, misplaced. Robin's sudden transformation into a state of hateful contempt illustrated how idealizations can fracture and not how they ease, blackening what was once too white.