The Analyst’s Vocation: Adrienne Harris’s “You Must Remember This.”

ABSTRACT

This brief essay focuses on Adrienne Harris’s consideration of the analyst’s vocation, both as work and as a calling. Harris identifies a psychoanalytic vocation as one that is “unsettled,” leaving analysts to examine countertransference by attending not only to their own affect states, but through the exhumation of generational transfers that are informed by social histories and constructions. Harris’s generative pedagogy, rooted in her capacious comparative scholarship, stands as exemplary of the analytic vocation.

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Après Coup of “You Must Remember This”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ One does not leave a paper by Harris without a reference to track. For example, after reading “You Must Remember This,” I read Sacha Nacht (1962), a Romanian born French psychoanalyst, whose work I did not know. I was struck by how his work presages what we take to be our modern discovery of the analyst’s relational presence and capacity for reverie as mutative action.

² Omnipotence, no doubt, plays a significant and multifaceted role in the analytic vocation and the analyst’s working states, from defense (as Harris examines), or the point that I am making about hope as a reach to see that which cannot be seen, to the stamina that is required across an analyst’s day, and so on.

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Notes on contributors

Ken Corbett

Ken Corbett, Professor, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is the author of “Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities,” and “A Murder Over a Girl: Justice, Gender, Junior High.”