Man on Wire: Walking the Therapeutically Transformative Tightrope of the Analyst’s Cancer

Abstract

Almost nothing was clear to me when I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I knew that I intended to inform all of my patients about my illness. But how could the focus remain on their needs when my mortality was so at risk? Unexpectedly, I discovered that I coped with my fears most effectively in my office. It was the one place where I could maintain a grasp on a holistic sense of myself and hold conflicting intense emotions. Additionally striking was the corresponding capacity of my patients to remain in treatment while addressing the unpredictable dyadic changes generated by my sickness. In this paper, I address this point of intersubjective transformation—the interactive contributions that generated each treatment’s unique rhythm. I also discuss the temporality of illness and how my continuing reconfigurations of self-experience impacted my ability to maintain authenticity and analytic balance both during and after treatment.

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Notes on contributors

Adam Kaplan

Adam Kaplan, Ph.D., is an Attending Clinical Psychologist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he is also the Coordinator of the adult track of the Psychology Internship Training Program. A graduate of the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, he has a faculty appointment at Columbia University and maintains a private practice in New York City. His most recent publication is the chapter “Male Infertility: The Erection of a Myth, the Myth of an Erection” in The Business of Being Made, published by Routledge.