Commentary on " Mortal Gifts: A Two-Part Essay on the Therapist' s Mortality" by Ellen Pinsky

Abstract

Dr. Pinsky has written eloquently about a subject that I feel psychoanalysis has avoided, the nature of what used to be called the “ real relationship” between analyst and analysand. Our myths of neutrality and abstinence converge in a myth of termination. We assert that our analytic patients will eventually resolve their perceptions of us based in their transferences and see us as merely guides who have done a job and who are no longer needed in their lives. On the other hand, there is evidence that transferential feelings about an analyst can resurface years later with minimal stimulation, and perhaps our analysands who do “ terminate” their work with us and go on with their lives carry internalizations of us with them that sustain them. Dr. Pinsky says that our field denies the mortality of the analyst; I suggest that we deny mortality by positing an imaginary end to the analytic relationship. In most cases, we can believe that the analytic relationship does end; most of our analytic patients do stop coming to see us. Even then, we deny a significant degree of the “ reality” of the relationship. How many of us are comfortable discussing our mourning for a patient we have worked with for years, over the course of which we came to an intimate knowledge of the patient. We cannot deny that our long-term patients also come to know much about us in the shared subjectivity that comes into existence in the matrix of transference and countertransference— and shared experience and affect. It is in the very special relationship between analyst and those analysands who become analysts that our myths most significantly break down. When we finish our training, many of us analysts have gone on to teach and train new candidates and to work with our “ former” analysts in various ways in our analytic societies and institutes and in other professional organizations. We cannot avoid encountering our analysts outside their offices, the claustra in which analysis occurs. I know of analysts who have written extensively about the work of their analysts, openly acknowledging the relationship and its effect on them and their own thinking; they seem truly “ professional children.” When I have asked about how this relationship is handled— professionally and so