Epilogue: New Psychoanalysts Speak – Reflections on Personal and Professional Transformations

Abstract

Hillman and Rosenblatt (2018) assembled a collection of essays from 12, established and well-known psychoanalysts, wherein contributors reflect years later on the process of their respective journeys to finding a true-to-self analytic voice and inner narrative. In particular, these analysts write about personal and life experiences that led them to discover their “own differentiated voice” and “raise the question of what kind of institution maximizes the potential for this kind of development” (p. 199). In contrast, the contributors to this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry are newly established or establishing and lesser-known psychoanalysts, who, also speak eloquently about their recent journeys each to finding a contemporary analytic voice grounded in lived experience. Several themes emerge from the narratives of these newly minted psychoanalysts. First, each contributor either explicitly or implicitly communicated that their training programs for the most part nourished their ongoing development as psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic thinkers. While some described disappointments with supervisors and others realized that their institute was not as sensitive as they thought it should or could be to issues of cultural and racial marginalization. Overall, as candidates they neither reported having to overcome exclusionary criteria (Holmes, 2018) nor enduring frankly abusive treatment by faculty in order to graduate (Rachman, 2021). Instead, these new analysts (Kathy Monroy, Debra Myers, Rochelle Broder, Ruth Migler, John Paddock, and Shirley Malove) write movingly about the warmth, support, and encouragement they received from their personal and training analysts, faculty, and colleagues – sometimes in the face of life-changing tragedy – to identify, nurture, embrace, and cherish their own analytic outlook and voice. Sandra Hershberg writes from the perspective of being a Director of Psychoanalytic Training to share her ideas about the process of becoming a psychoanalyst, implicitly referring to the kind of support training programs need to encourage and nourish each candidates’ unique developmental journey. Second, most authors describe experiences of being “different” or the “Other,” either explicitly or implicitly of having struggled to better understand lived and intergenerationally transmitted life events to become grounded in their own truths – as psychoanalysts and as human primates who, like the patients they see, seek empathically attuned, genuine, warm, and meaningful relational connection, connection that changes the life of both the analyst and patient (Slavin & Kriegman, 1998). These are analysts who seem to have embraced the relational turn in psychoanalysis. Additionally, hearing their unique stories of being othered and how their personal analysis alongside the accumulated power of psychoanalytic training (a course of study, supervision, and personal analyses) provided personal and professional transcendence and transformation is very much in keeping with the important socio-cultural turn in psychoanalysis. Third, all contributors discuss in one form or another of both having witnessed the struggles of significant others in their lives that antedated the decision to pursue psychoanalytic training (Hillman & Rosenblatt, 2018), and being with patients, what Eshel (2019) calls patient-analyst “withnessing” in intersubjective moments of relational connection, along with being present and still (Berzoff, 2019), holding (Slochower, 2014), and committed to mutual meaning-making (Aron, 1996). Consistent with observations reported by Hillman and Rosenblatt (2018), our contributors seem “gifted at understanding the needs of psychically wounded parents . . . [and/or to] the suffering of their community”