Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional

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Winner of the 2015 Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP) for the best edited psychoanalytic book of the year.

Edited by Steven Kuchuck
Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience explores how leaders in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy address the phenomena of the psychoanalyst’s personal life and psychology. In this edited book, each author describes pivotal childhood and adult life events and crises that have contributed to personality formation, personal and professional functioning, choices of theoretical positions, and clinical technique.

By expanding psychoanalytic study beyond clinical theory and technique to include a more careful examination of the psychoanalyst’s life events and other subjective phenomena, readers will have an opportunity to focus on specific ways in which these events and crises affect the tenor of the therapist’s presence in the consulting room, and how these occurrences affect clinical choices. Chapters cover a broad range of topics including illness, adoption, sexual identity and experience, trauma, surviving the death of one’s own analyst, working during 9/11, cross cultural issues, growing up in a communist household, and other family dynamics.

Throughout, Steven Kuchuck (ed) shows how contemporary psychoanalysis teaches that it is only by acknowledging the therapist’s life experience and resulting psychological makeup that analysts can be most effective in helping their patients. However, to date, few articles and fewer books have been entirely devoted to this topic. Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience forges new ground in exploring these under-researched areas. It will be essential reading for practicing psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, those working in other mental health fields and graduate students alike.

Table of Contents

Introduction
STEVEN KUCHUCK

PART I
Early life events, crises, and influences

1 How Betty and Vincent became Sally and Scott
SALLY BJORKLUND

2 I wanted the stuff of secrets to be in the light
SUSIE ORBACH

3 Sex, lies, and psychoanalysis
GALIT ATLAS

4 The professional idiom and the psychoanalytic other
JOYCE SLOCHOWER

5 Emerging from the oppositional and the negative
IRWIN HIRSCH

6 Out from hiding
KENNETH A. FRANK

7 Reflections on the development of my analytic subjectivity
ANNA ORNSTEIN

8 The personal is political, the political is personal: on the subjectivity of an Israeli psychoanalyst
CHANA ULLMAN

9 Sweet dreams are made of this: (or, how I came out and came into my own)
ERIC SHERMAN

PART II
Later life events, crises, and developmental passages

10 Moments that count
MICHAEL EIGEN

11 Guess who’s going to dinner? On the arrival of the uninvited third
STEVEN KUCHUCK

12 Becoming an analyst: at play in three acts
PHILIP RINGSTROM

13 Perspectives on gay fatherhood: emotional legacies and clinical reverberations
NOAH GLASSMAN AND STEVEN BOTTICELLI

14 The importance of fathers
HILLARY GRILL

15 Working through separation: personal and clinical reflections
ERIC MENDELSOHN

16 A bird that thunders: my analysis with Emmanuel Ghent
BONNIE ZINDEL

17 Stroke and the fracturing of the self: rebuilding a life and a practice
DEBORAH PINES

18 Psychoanalysis in old age: the patient and the analyst
MARTIN BERGMANN