Notes
1I would not argue that our accounts of our own experiences as patients are more “true” than our accounts of the experiences we attribute to our patients, for memory is always presently created, and all writing creates texts that are their own “reality.” I am simply proposing that writing and theorizing about ourselves as patients, coming from our analytically trained minds, makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of analytic processes.
2A modest body of analytic writing memorializes personal analyses with famous analysts rather than theorizes about analytic process. CitationGuntrip (1975) wrote about his analyses with Fairbairn and Winnicott to illustrate his history as a theorist. CitationLittle (1990) described her analysis with Winnicott and also touched on her earlier analyses with a Dr. X and Sharpe. CitationSonnenberg (2006) has written a brief memoir/appreciation of his analysis with Gray as a commentary on a paper by CitationPhillips (2006). And CitationKohut (1979) does not write in the first person in “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z,” but CitationStrozier (2001), in his definitive biography, marshals evidence that the paper is autobiographical.
3Coburn (this issue) might see this as a “system constraint.”
4The character of Betty Draper, in the first season of Mad Men, the award-winning TV series that meticulously depicts the cultural zeitgeist of the 1960s, is in just such a painfully sterile analysis. But to our surprise, we see, and she says, that her treatment helped her in important, if limited, ways. Finally finding someone who wanted to hear what she had to say and who listened to her, which was a new experience, her symptoms dissolved, and she became strong enough to find a way out of her sterile marriage even if the limitations of her personality remained.