Patients Reading about Themselves: a Stimulus to Psychoanalytic Work

Abstract

Patients’ reading of their psychoanalysts’ papers about them as a vehicle for psychoanalytic work is a relatively new phenomenon in the field. Over the past five years, reports of analysts’ employment of their writing in this fashion have begun to appear in the analytic literature. This paper presents clinical illustrations of this specific use of analysts’ writing. These illustrations were drawn from interviews with analysts who published clinical articles in Psychoanalytic Dialogues between 1995 and 2003. The author considers some of the clinical and scientific implications of this use of papers written for publication.