As the guest editor of this issue I was given a blank canvas, a blank table of contents. I decided to fill it with a collage of our contributors’ personal projects, individual journeys, both those done alone and those done with others, about which I had been aware and which inspired me. Each of these writers was teaching others about what we call an analytic way of thinking or perhaps an analytic way of being. It is often not our theory, but our way of listening, of thinking and of being, that draws others to analysis, as our students or as our patients.
None of the authors who contributed to this issue seem to have initially felt that what they were doing would be transformative, but I believe that their projects have promoted important changes, and that these could also occur elsewhere as well. I have felt for some time that their work needed a wider audience or perhaps a wider audience needed them. Some of these articles are about how analysts reached outward from their analytic institute to engage an emerging analytic interest in new trainees or to inform and educate other analysts, non-analysts and the larger community. Some of the projects reached inward into the analytic institute to enhance the learning of our therapy students, analytic candidates, members and faculty.
Janet Noonan begins by taking us outside of the analytic institute and into the world of early career therapists who have some desire to go deeper in their work with patients. She asks us about the moment when each of us decided to become a psychoanalyst. She addresses the barriers to analytic training experienced by early career clinicians, and how she and others at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute have overcome some of these. She shares ways in which potential analytic candidates and psychotherapy trainees can become engaged through lectures, and by contact with potential mentors, supervisors, and current trainees. She describes the array of efforts, the obstacles, and the eventual success in the institute’s efforts to introduce new clinicians to both an analytic way of thinking and to their potential new analytic home at the institute, while creating comfort and often a flow between the institute’s “one-year Fellowship; the three-year Advanced Training Program in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; and the Adult and Child Analytic Training Programs.”
Steven Marans takes the analyst out of the institute, into the streets, and the police patrol cars that go to the homes of children, seen sitting immobilized and robotically watching television, after they have witnessed domestic violence, or death as a result of stabbings, gunfire, or drug overdoses. He describes helping the children, and often the police, deal with the trauma that they have experienced. Such is the world that Marans conveys in his life’s work of outreach to victims of childhood trauma, and the development of a collaborative working relationship with the police department of New Haven, Connecticut. He describes an active engagement with his subjects and his police partners in an intense type of therapeutic involvement outside of the office, in which the analyst’s training and persona can aid the victims of trauma, can help the police (often with their own vulnerability to witnessing trauma), and can influence governmental policy makers and the policies they make.
In a different way Harvey Schwartz reaches outward through the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) podcast “Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch.” Harvey speaks about his desire to show how analysts can bring analytic sensibilities to multiple settings outside of the office. Inside our offices we may try to deepen a transference experience and use it to help patients more clearly see their past. Doing analytically attuned work outside the office requires its own skillset. He illustrates the various ways analytic attunement may be expressed outside the office, with examples from various of his interviews. Harvey shows how some analysts coming from different backgrounds have expressed their sensitivity to the needs of others in ways that embody an analytic sensibility, but ways that were different from our usual idea of a typical analytic stance. He also informs us of how he uses podcasting to communicate, while perhaps stimulating some of us to consider types of outreach ourselves.
Stephanie Schechter reverses our direction and takes us back into the analytic institute as she describes a series of “egregious boundary violations” and the identified need in her institute “to address questions of ethics, boundaries, and professional conduct.” She describes her institute’s efforts to deal with not only sexual transgressions, but a wide swath of ethical and traumatic dilemmas to which analysts are potentially vulnerable. Through a series of extended and well written clinical vignettes about such ethical quandaries, descriptions that have no easy answer or solution, she shows how these can become alive for discussion by the students, analytic society members, and institute faculty. The vignettes are discussed in workshops which unlock “the shame and sense of isolation through a communal acknowledgment that confusion and uncertainty is inevitable and universal.”
Jennifer Stuart continues our educational journey inside the analytic institute, as she describes her teaching of case writing to candidates at The Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY). She describes her own discovery of Freud and his cases through an undergraduate seminar with Peter Gay, and the rigorous attention to critical reading, close clinical observation, and later on to case presentations and writing, during her analytically infused doctoral program. This was in great contrast with what she encountered in her analytic training, where clinical writing, written feedback or discussion of rewriting was rarely part of supervision. She describes how she decided to bring Freud’s cases of Dora and Hans into the writing sequence she has taught, and how she creates an environment of safety and collaboration in these seminars. She feels that reading Freud’s cases can allow candidates to examine some of the anxieties they feel in exposing their own work in writing.
Dan Jacobs takes us back to Freud’s mountain walk with Katharina, the subject of one of his case histories, to show the story beneath the story, the alive and possibly sexual influences that might not have initially been seen, but when explained gave that stroll some context and personal meaning for the seminar group he was teaching. As Dan takes us to an earlier time in Vienna, it is apparent how much is lost without understanding the life and times in which Freud was immersed. Dan guides us as we join Freud in his milieu, and as Freud learns from his own mistakes, such as when he sees that he had not mastered the transference soon enough to understand Dora, so that she might stay. He advises institutes to prepare candidates in more depth about the context in which Freud lived. He describes how he would enrich the engagement of candidates with Freud’s work, and how the resistance to those works might be rectified. Dan asks us to see Freud as a man of his time, but whose works, in their historical context, are essential even in our time.
Finally, Mark Moore describes how it is “In The Teachers’ Lounge,” a community space he has organized, in which the institute faculty can come together to discuss and deepen their experience as teachers. He describes the transition of analysts from their more private offices to the more public classroom, and how we have not formally been prepared for this. As a way to enhance his institute’s teaching he has organized an ongoing teachers’ meeting every other week, a group discussion about the challenges of teaching. I was very impressed with his idea that while we “maintain relative anonymity with our patients,” … “we share more of ourselves” while teaching. He addresses how our work in the classroom can ease the loneliness we sometimes feel in our analytic work by speaking with a “receptive audience,” in our seminars.
Stephen B. Bernstein, M.D.
Issue Editor
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Notes on contributors
Stephen B. Bernstein
Stephen B. Bernstein, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst, and a former Chair of the Education Committee at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. His analytic articles have centered on the preparation of patients for analysis and the transition from psychotherapy, and on how candidates and analysts can write more openly and deeply about their analytic work. He has also written on the analysis of patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).