How Did It Happen? Writing—A Royal Road to Becoming/Being an Analyst (Through the Lens of Complexity Theory)

ABSTRACT

Through the theoretical lens of self psychology and complexity theory, the author illuminates how it happened that writing, and the professional opportunities that emerged because she was an analytic writer, became the royal road to the creation of her sense of being, mostly, a competent analyst after analytic training that left her feeling insecure and inadequate. Then, she describes recent work with a patient, Tom, to open a window into her consulting room and illuminate herself as an analyst at work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Now I would say being a “bad girl” was a badge of honor. I resisted, and persisted, after all.

² According to Lichtenberg, these “utterances remain within the boundaries of professional ethics and practices and within the tolerance of the … patient.” They are spontaneous because they have the “eruptive character of an unsuppressed emotional upsurge.” They are “outside the book” (p. 150).

³ Coltart (1986) thinks “laughter and enjoyment can be therapeutic in psychoanalysis, and she searches for evidence in Bion to free ‘the sacred process of Psychoanalysis’ from its prohibition on [spontaneous] laughter” (p. 11). And I quoted Bion in my first paper: “It is only in practice that ‘you discover that it is worth your while talking to patients in the way you talk to them – never mind whether it is sanctified by appearing in one of the Collected Works’” (Bion, 1980, quoted in Levin, 2006, p. 773).

⁴ Psychoanalytic Inquiry, founded forty years ago by Joe Lichtenberg and Mel Bornstein, is a unique journal that seeks to foster creativity by offering guest editors the opportunity to propose issue topics and invite contributors (whose papers are not then peer reviewed).

⁵ I sent the paper to my analyst, and when I was chatting with her at a meeting, she told me she’d read it (I knew she would). I could tell her in person how much I appreciated her devotion and perseverance.

⁶ A new “iteration,” of an old experience, as opposed to a simple repetition, heralds the possibility of doing something new or more with it (Levin, 2011, p. 571).

⁷ Mel has a saying I like: “If your plate is full, get a bigger plate.”

⁸ I’ve arrived at the view, as have many of my colleagues, that it isn’t the frequency of sessions or the patient being on the couch, or not, that determines whether a patient is “in analysis.” It’s a clinician’s qualities of mind, whether or not she brings analytic understanding to the work, that creates analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carol B. Levin

Carol B. Levin, M.D., is Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Inquiry and Psychoanalysis, Self and Context; Faculty and Member, Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and Society; and Training Analyst, Michigan Council for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.