Not every therapist should become a psychoanalyst. Not every clinician should become a psychotherapist. And, different people mean different things when they use the words “psychoanalysis” and “psychoanalyst.”
My definition of psychoanalysis
I want to be clear: I do not say any of this with any prejudice against other definitions. In this post, I am writing about what I mean when I use these words in this context. I don’t exclude, disparage, or disagree with other definitions. They just don’t describe what I mean here, for this purpose.
My definition of “psychoanalysis”: a long-term project undertaken by two people, typically at a frequency of three, four, or five times a week, and typically, with the analysand, or “patient” – the person undergoing the treatment – lying on a couch, and the analyst – the person facilitating the treatment – sitting on a chair behind the patient. The analyst listens to the patient, and responds with what they hear; the patient does their best to say whatever comes to mind. That’s it. That’s “psychoanalysis,” as I use the term.
My experience of analysis
I’ve participated in two analyses as a patient. The first – the one that led me to decide to become an analyst myself – took place over nineteen years, with a seven-year gap between years eight and nine, beginning when I was 24, and ending at 43. My second analysis, which began two years after my first analysis ended, is in its tenth year as I write this. Both analyses began as twice-weekly face-to-face treatments. Both rapidly developed into four-times-a-week lying-on-the-couch treatments. My first analyst invited me into analysis; my second analyst, I selected specifically for the purpose of conducting my “training analysis,” the analysis in which I would participate while in analytic training.
As is true for many people, I didn’t “seek” my first analysis. I entered therapy with what I imagined was a discrete problem: a relationship in which I wasn’t happy, but which I felt powerless to change or leave. Very quickly, I understood my “problem” was much more… complicated… than I initially imagined/hoped. It was in that context that my therapist’s suggestion I begin an analysis landed, and that I embarked on what I couldn’t yet imagine would be a life-changing journey.
Without going into specifics, I will simply say that, by the time we terminated, nineteen years after we began, I had transformed radically, in ways I never had imagined possible. My relationships deepened. My work flourished. I became close with my father. I transformed my relationship to the memory of my mother, who died when I was young, and left the home in which I lived with my father when I was much younger than that. I gained access to an authenticity that had previously eluded me, and perceived options where previously I had seen only compulsions. Perhaps most important, my marriage, and my family of choice, blossomed magically.
When that first analysis ended, I knew I would become an analyst. My analysis had been so powerful, so transformative, so interesting – and I didn’t imagine for a moment that its interest derived from anything about me – that I craved much more, and from both sides of the couch. My first analyst – a man, classically trained at Columbia – allowed me to reconfigure my relationship with my father. And while we also, as I said, transformed my relationship to the memory of my mother, I knew instinctively that an analysis with a woman would unlock unimaginable possibilities in that regard – and others.
Ten years into my second analysis, this one with a woman, trained classically at CFS, I was right.
