Living Large: My Expanded Life as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist

By Teresa Rose, Ph.D.

Pondering what it means to be a psychoanalytic psychotherapist has prompted a great deal of free association and deep thinking. It touches me in many profound ways, and to try and tease out the meanings has been a challenge, albeit an exciting one. Overall, my analytic identity is so tightly entwined with my personality that it is hard to separate them. The more I learn and study, the more I apply analytic concepts to most aspects of my life, not just in my practice. In fact it is impossible not to do so. Writing about this topic, I found it difficult to focus on any one area of my life, so I gave up, and embraced all the ways it affects me.


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The Perils (and Joys) of Living as a Psychoanalytic Therapist

By Dora Ghetie

It is 7 p.m. on a Friday night. I am sitting at the bar, in one of my favorite restaurants, waiting for my date. This is my first date with Andrew. Normally I would be nervous but I have been on so many first dates lately, I feel totally confident. Being on a first date is strangely similar to conducting an intake. I cannot help it-as a fifth year doctoral student, soon to become full-fledged psychologist, I am immersed in therapy: doing therapy, being in therapy, and reading about therapy. This is my life. My fondness for psychoanalytic therapy is a further problem. All day long I listen for what is not being said and I try to look for patterns and how they show up in the transference. I cannot turn it off. So before long I ask my dates: tell me about your family. What's your earliest memory? What kind of relationships have you had? Do you dream? Just like an intake. Hmmm…maybe that's why there have been so few second dates.


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Etudes on Loss

By Jill Salberg, Ph.D.

For many first and second generation American Jews the Holocaust stands as the defining event in their lives. Much like the list recited at Yom Kippur: Who escaped, who didn't, who went to Palestine, who to South America, who was hidden, who was revealed. The list could go on and on but the fundamental event defines it all: who lived and who died. For me the story is more ephemeral, about what was lost, sacrificed in order to live. And this story started thirty years before, while the seeds of the Shoah were growing, during the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. This era brought thousands of Jewish immigrants to America while the doors still remained opened. I always felt I was one of the fortunate ones, my grandparents left long before Hitler, long before an Anschluss, a final solution. I have only begun to fully comprehend that their good fortune was mixed with great separations, hardships and loss.


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Fugue on a Figured Bass...and other duets

By Fern W. Cohen, Ph.D.

Some time ago, in the midst of revising an article under consideration by a psychoanalytic journal, I had reluctantly agreed to relinquish a musical metaphor in the concluding paragraph that compared the role of the analyst in the psychoanalytic process to that of a figured bass. It was, the editors had written, a striking analogy, but they believed that it introduced a "discordant" note in an otherwise "mellifluous" paper. In their suggestions for "fine-tuning," they felt that the rather obscure technical term would require explanation in an already longish paper and they encouraged me to end on a different "note." If the bad news was that they stood firm on their editorial ground, the good news was that they had accepted my article for a forthcoming issue of the journal. Furthermore. Since I had been "beating the drum" for my conclusion, perhaps I could come up with another paper and expand on it there?


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In Passage

By Susan E. Barbour, Ed.D.

Ralph McTell's song 'The Ferryman" (The Songs of Ralph McTell, 1991) captures my experience as a traveler and provides a metaphor for the journey of a psychoanalytic process. Psychoanalysis is an intense interpersonal and internal process and one that, as Jane Hall (1998) writes, is contingent on the therapist's ability to help the patient "recognize that this a journey worth taking and that the therapist is a trustworthy guide" (p.2). The destination cannot be anticipated for an individual, and attempting to contrive it would defeat its premise. Transformation is the ultimate goal. Freud likened the role of the analyst to that of the midwife. "As the midwife neither creates the child nor decides what he will be but only helps the mother to give birth to him safely, so the psychoanalyst can neither bring the new personality into being nor determine what it ought to be; only the person who is analyzing himself can make himself over" (Bettleheim, 1982, p. 66). Psychoanalysis is distinctive in today's world, advocating that there are no "fast answers, that advice is a disservice, and that exploring ideas and expressing feelings are the most valuable tools leading to growth" (Hall, 1998, p.4). So as Ralph McTell's song begins, the traveler is weary from his journey:

And he is very heavy laden, with the questions in his burden…
He has crossed the mountains, and he has forded streams.
And he has spent a long time surviving on his dreams.
As many times he's tried, to lighten up his heavy load,
his compromises failed him and he ends back on the road.

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