The Analyst's Need and Desire

Abstract

The analyst's capacity to do analytic work is both a talent and a need. This paper discusses the analyst's empathic capacity as arising from early childhood wounds and deficits that draw us to the profession in the first place and sustain our commitment to it over time. The selection of analytic work as a career is, for many and perhaps most of us, more an imperative than a choice. Over time, the pressures on the analyst's narcissistic equilibrium can change, exposing vulnerabilities that may be insufficiently attended to, as we valorize the needs of others over our own.

Psychoanalytic work demands a regressive and progressive fluctuation of emotional resonance within a context of structured power imbalances. There are also dynamic, resistive pressures to level the imbalances from within ourselves and from the analysand as the analytic context both stimulates and frustrates needs and wishes for both analyst and analysand. The constant dismissal of personal need is frustrating and depleting, yet the analyst is also partially gratified and titillated by the moments of attunement that the analysand offers. The frustration of asymmetry is counterbalanced by the seduction of mutuality, temporarily unsettling and decentering the analyst. We must come to this work centered and fortified, past injuries largely healed and mourned, our present desires largely sated. The importance of social supports, including a primary intimate relationship, is discussed as part of the necessary framework around which we conduct our work.

Notes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute Symposium, “What Do Analysts Want? The Use and Misuse of Patients,” April 2008; the Division 39 Spring Meeting, New York, 2008; and the American Psychoanalytic Association, Winter Meeting, New York, 2009.

¹Recent neuroscientific research on mirror neurons (Olds, 2006) has explored the neurophysiological substrates of this identificatory capacity, especially the biological mechanism of imitation and its relationship to identification. These mechanisms include the capacity to evoke memories from the past (attunement) as well as those involved in imagining new or different experiences outside one's subjective repertiore. Both are part of empathic resonance, however I focus here on aspects of attunement that involve personal references to the analyst's past.

²In my experience, colleagues, supervisors, and consultants do not sufficiently meet the need I am describing. Though peer supervision groups and consultations play an essential role in our clinical life (Gabbard, 2000; B. Pizer, 2000; S. Pizer, 2000; Celenza, 2006, 2007) too many transgressors were in such groups or had received appropriate consultation yet transgressed anyway. There is a special quality of intimacy that I aim to examine and pose here as a personal and occupational need. Various gratifications in the analyst's outside life play similar functions and are certainly necessary but like consultations, they are not sufficient to address the needs I am describing.