Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90:311–327 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00130.

On becoming a psychoanalyst

Glen O. Gabbard and Thomas H. Ogden

Baylor College of Medicine – Psychiatry, 6655 Travis Street, Suite 500,
Houston, Texas 77030, USA – [email protected]; [email protected]

(Final acceptance date 12 November 2008)

One has the opportunity and responsibility to become an analyst in one’s own
terms in the course of the years of practice that follow the completion of formal
analytic training. The authors discuss their understanding of some of the matura-
tional experiences that have contributed to their becoming analysts in their own
terms. They believe that the most important element in the process of their matu-
ration as analysts has been the development of the capacity to make use of what
is unique and idiosyncratic to each of them; each, when at his best, conducts him-
self as an analyst in a way that reflects his own analytic style; his own way of
being with, and talking with, his patients; his own form of the practice of psycho-
analysis. The types of maturational experiences that the authors examine include
situations in which they have learned to listen to themselves speak with their
patients and, in so doing, begin to develop a voice of their own; experiences of
growth that have occurred in the context of presenting clinical material to a con-
sultant; making self-analytic use of their experience with their patients; creating ⁄
discovering themselves as analysts in the experience of analytic writing (with
particular attention paid to the maturational experience involved in writing the
current paper); and responding to a need to keep changing, to be original in their
thinking and behavior as analysts.

Keywords: development, history of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic education

Few of us feel that we really know what we are doing when we complete
our formal psychoanalytic training. We flounder. We strive to find our
‘voice’, our own ‘style’, a feeling that we are engaging in the practice of
psychoanalysis in a way that bears our own watermark:
It is only after you have qualified [as an analyst] that you have a chance of
becoming an analyst. The analyst you become is you and you alone; you have to
respect the uniqueness of your own personality – that is what you use, not all
these interpretations [these theories that you use to combat the feeling that you
are not really an analyst and do not know how to become one].
(Bion, 1987, p. 15)
In this paper we discuss a variety of maturational experiences that have
been important to us in our own efforts to become analysts following our
analytic training. Of course, the types of experience that were of particular
value to each of us were different, but they also overlapped in important
ways. We try to convey both the commonality of, and the differences
between, the sorts of experience that have been most significant to us in our
efforts to become (to mature as) analysts. In addition, we discuss several
defensive measures that analysts in general, and we in particular, have made

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312 G. O. Gabbard and T. H. Ogden

use of in the face of the anxiety that is inherent to the process of genuinely
becoming an analyst in one’s own terms.

A theoretical context
A variety of experiences throughout one’s development as an analyst are
fundamental to one’s maturation as both an analyst and an individual. The
maturation of the analyst has much in common with psychic development
in general. We have identified four aspects of psychic growth that are essen-
tial to our view of the process of becoming an analyst.
The first is the idea that thinking ⁄ dreaming one’s lived experience in the
world constitutes a principal means, perhaps the principal means, by which
one learns from experience and achieves psychological growth (Bion,
1962a). Moreover, one’s lived experience often is so disturbing as to exceed
the individual’s capacity to do anything with it psychically, i.e. to think or
dream it. Under such circumstances, it requires two people to think or
dream the experience. The psychoanalysis of each of our patients inevitably
places us in situations that we have never before experienced and, as a
result, requires of us a larger personality than that which we have brought
to the analysis. We view this as true of every analysis: there is no such thing
as an ‘easy’ or ‘straightforward’ analysis. The reconceptualization of projec-
tive identification as an intrapsychic ⁄ interpersonal process in the writings of
Bion (1962a, 1962b) and Rosenfeld (1987) recognizes that in these novel,
disturbing analytic situations the analyst requires another person to help
make the unthinkable thinkable. That other person is most often the patient,
but may be a supervisor, colleague, mentor, consultation group, and so on.
Inherent in this notion of intersubjective thinking is the idea that,
throughout the life of the individual, ‘‘It takes [at least] two people to make
one’’ (Bion, 1987). It requires a mother-and-infant capable of helping the
infant to achieve ‘‘unit status’’ (Winnicott, 1958a, p. 44). It takes three peo-
ple – mother, father and child – to create a healthy oedipal child; it takes
three people – mother, father and adolescent – to create a young adult; it
takes two young adults to create a psychological space in which to create a
couple that is, in turn, capable of creating a psychological space in which a
baby can be conceived (literally and metaphorically); it takes a combination
of a young family and an old one (a grandmother, grandfather, mother,
father and child) to create conditions that contribute to, or facilitate the
acceptance and creative use of, the experience of aging and death in the
grandparents (Loewald, 1979).
However, this intersubjective conception of the development of the analyst
is incomplete in the absence of its intrapsychic counterpart. This brings us
to the second aspect of the theoretical context for this discussion: in order
to think ⁄ dream our own experience, we need periods of personal isolation
no less than we need the participation of the minds of others. Winnicott
(1963) recognized this essential developmental requirement when he noted:
‘‘There is an intermediate stage in healthy development in which the
patient’s most important experience in relation to the good or potentially
satisfying object is the refusal of it’’ (p. 182). In the analytic setting, the

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psychological work that is done between the sessions is no less important

than the work done with the analyst in the sessions. Indeed, analyst and
patient need to ‘sleep on’ the session, i.e. they need to dream it on their own
before they are able to do further work as an analytic pair. Similarly, in the
sessions, the psychological work that the patient does in isolation from the
analyst (and that the analyst does in his isolated space behind the couch) is
as important as the thinking ⁄ dreaming that the two do with one another.
These dimensions – the interpersonal and the solitary – are fully interdepen-
dent and stand in dialectical tension with one another. (When we speak of
personal isolation, we are referring to a psychological state different from
the state of being alone in the presence of another person, i.e. Winnicott’s
[1958b] ‘capacity to be alone’. Rather, what we have in mind is a state that
is much less dependent on external, or even internalized, object relations
[see Ogden, 1991, for a discussion of this healthy state of ‘personal isola-
tion’]).
The third aspect of psychic growth that is essential to our conception of
maturation in the analyst is the idea that becoming an analyst involves a
process of ‘‘dreaming oneself more fully into existence’’ (Ogden, 2004a,
p. 858) in progressively more complex and inclusive ways. In the tradition of
Bion (1962a), we are using the term ‘dreaming’ to refer to the most pro-
found form of thinking. It is a type of thinking in which the individual is
able to transcend the limits of secondary process logic without loss of access
to that form of logic. Dreaming occurs continuously, both during sleep and
during waking life. Just as the stars persist even when their light is obscured
by the light of the sun, so, too, dreaming is a continuous function of the
mind that continues during waking life even though obscured from con-
sciousness by the glare of waking life. (Waking dreaming in the analytic set-
ting takes the form of the analyst’s reverie experience [Bion, 1962a; Ogden,
1997].) The timelessness of dreams allows one to simultaneously elaborate a
multiplicity of perspectives on an emotional experience in a way that is not
possible in the context of linear time, and cause and effect logic that charac-
terize waking, secondary process thinking. (The simultaneity of multiple per-
spectives that was captured in the cubist art of Picasso and Braque has had
an influence on 20th century art of every genre – the poetry of T.S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound, the novels of Faulkner and the late novels of Henry James,
the plays of Harold Pinter and Ionesco, and the films of Kieslowski and
David Lynch, as well as the art of psychoanalysis.)
The work of dreaming is the psychological work through which we create
personal, symbolic meaning, thereby becoming ourselves. It is in this sense
that we dream ourselves into existence as analysts, analysands, supervisors,
parents, friends, and so on. In the absence of dreaming, we cannot learn
from our lived experience and consequently remain trapped in an endless,
unchanging present.
The fourth aspect of psychic growth that we believe to be fundamental to
the way we think about the process of becoming an analyst is Bion’s (1962a,
1970) concept of the container–contained. The ‘container’ is not a thing,
but a process of doing psychological work with our disturbing thoughts.
The term ‘doing psychological work’ is roughly equivalent to such

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ideas ⁄ feelings as the experience of ‘coming to terms with’ an aspect of one’s

life that has been difficult to acknowledge or ‘making one’s peace with’
important, deeply disturbing events in one’s life such as the death of a par-
ent, a child, or a spouse, or one’s own approaching death. The ‘contained’
is the psychological representation of what one is coming to terms with or
making one’s peace with. The breakdown of a mutually generative relation-
ship between thoughts derived from disturbing experience (the contained)
and the capacity to think ⁄ dream those thoughts (the container) may take a
number of forms which manifest themselves in a variety of types of failure
to mature as an analyst (Ogden, 2004b). The disturbing lived experiences –
‘the contained’ (for example, boundary violations on the part of the ana-
lyst’s personal analyst) – may destroy the analyst’s capacity for thinking as
an analyst (‘the container’), particularly under certain emotional circum-
stances (Gabbard and Lester, 1995).
With these ideas in mind, we will now consider a set of maturational
experiences that are common to analysts in the course of their development.
When one completes psychoanalytic training, one often has the vague sense
of feeling a bit fraudulent. One is authorized to ‘fly solo’ without the help
of a supervisor, yet one feels a degree of turbulence that can be disconcert-
ing. At times, analysts welcome the opportunity to learn from (and mature
in) the sorts of analytic situations that we are about to describe. At other
times, under other circumstances, analysts suddenly and inadvertently find
themselves immersed in these disturbing analytic situations and achieve psy-
chological growth by means of ‘flying by the seat of their pants’.

Maturational experiences of the analyst

In the sections of the paper that follow, we discuss a number of types of
maturational experience that have played an important role in the develop-
ment of our analytic identities. These experiences include the gradual pro-
cess of developing one’s own way of speaking with patients; developing
one’s sense of oneself as an analyst in the course of presenting clinical work
to a consultant; making self-analytic use of experiences with patients; and
creating ⁄ discovering oneself as an analyst in the process of writing analytic
papers.

I. Developing a voice of one’s own

In listening to oneself speak (for example, to one’s patients, supervisees, col-
leagues and seminar members), one asks oneself: ‘‘What do I sound like
when I speak like that?’’ ‘‘Do I really want to sound like that?’’ ‘‘Who do
I sound like?’’ ‘‘In what ways do I sound foreign to the person I have
become and am becoming?’’ ‘‘If I were to speak differently, what might that
sound like?’’ ‘‘How would it feel to speak in a way that is different from
anyone other than me?’’ There is a paradox in the fact that speaking natu-
rally, as oneself, is both easy (in the sense of not having to pretend to be
someone other than oneself) and very difficult (in the sense of finding ⁄
inventing a voice that emerges from the totality of who one is at a
given moment). When paying close attention, one discovers that there are

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unmistakable residues of one’s analyst’s voice in the words spoken to one’s

patients. These ways of speaking are ‘in our bones’, internalized long ago
and made part of us without our being aware of the assimilation process.
While this mode of maturational experience largely occurs in the context
of speaking to others, there is also an intrapsychic aspect, a conscious and
unconscious battle with oneself in the effort to find ⁄ create oneself as an
analyst. The voices one hears are largely in one’s head (Smith, 2001), and
belong to our ‘‘ghosts’’ and ‘‘ancestors’’ (Loewald, 1960, p. 249). The ghosts
inhabit us in a way that is not fully integrated into our sense of self; our
ancestors provide us with a sense of continuity with the past. In the process
of becoming an analyst, we must ‘dream up’ for ourselves an authentic way
of speaking that involves disentangling ourselves from our own analyst(s) as
well as past supervisors, teachers and writers we admire, while also drawing
on what we have learned from them. A dialectical tension exists between
inventing oneself freshly, on the one hand, and creatively using one’s emo-
tional ancestry, on the other.
No one has described better than Loewald the psychological dilemmas
that are involved in the passage of authority from one generation to the
next. In The waning of the Oedipus complex, Loewald (1979) describes the
ways in which growing up (becoming a mature individual in one’s own
right) requires that one simultaneously kill one’s parents (in more than a
metaphoric way) and immortalize them. The parricide is an act of claiming
one’s own place as a person responsible for oneself and to oneself; the
immortalizing of one’s parents (an act of atonement [‘at-one-ment’] for the
parricide) involves a metamorphic internalization of the parents. This inter-
nalization is ‘metamorphic’ in that the parents are not simply transformed
into an aspect of oneself (a simple identification). Rather it is an internaliza-
tion of a far richer sort: that of incorporating into one’s own identity a ver-
sion of the parents that includes a conception of who they might have
become, but were unable to become, as a consequence of the limitations of
their own personalities and the circumstances in which they lived. What bet-
ter atonement can one make to the parents one kills (Ogden, 2006)?
In the process of becoming an analyst, one must be able to commit acts
of parricide in relation to one’s own analytic parents, while atoning for the
parricide in the act of internalizing a transformed version of them. That
metamorphic internalization recognizes their strengths and weaknesses and
involves an incorporation into one’s identity of a sense not only of who they
were, but also of who they might have become, had external and internal
circumstances allowed.
In the following clinical vignette, one of us (Ogden) describes an experi-
ence in which patient and analyst together lived and dreamt an experience
that facilitated maturation on both their parts.
For a significant period of time, the analyst found himself using the word
well to introduce virtually every question and comment that he addressed to
his patients. It felt so natural that it took him a long time to recognize the
fact that he had adopted this pattern of speech. He also noticed that he
spoke in this way only while talking with patients and not while speaking
with supervisees, conversing in seminars, talking with colleagues, and so on.

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On becoming aware that he was speaking in this way, it was immediately

apparent to him that he had adopted a mannerism of his first analyst. He
felt no need to ‘correct it’ since, he told himself, he experienced it as an
emotional connection with a man he liked and admired. What he did not
realize was that he also saw no need to look into it (i.e. to think about why
this identification had evidenced itself in that form at that juncture in his
life and at that juncture in his work with these particular patients).
One of the patients with whom he was working in analysis during this per-
iod was Mr. A, a man who had chosen a career in the same field in which
his father was a prominent figure. It was in the sessions with this patient –
though there were related experiences with other patients – that he began to
feel differently about what had seemed to him a harmless quirk in his man-
ner of speech. This shift in perspective came over a period of weeks as he
listened to Mr. A minimize the effect on him of having entered the same
field as his father while at the same time repeatedly using the phrase ‘his
field’ instead of ‘my field’ or ‘our field’. During this period of the analysis
Mr. A mentioned an instance in which it seemed to the analyst that the
patient was very uncharacteristically teasing one of his children for ‘trying
to act like a grown-up’. Even though the analyst did not comment on the
behavior, it had a disturbing effect on him.
At the beginning of a session during this period of work, the patient com-
plained that the analyst was making too much of the effects of his choice to
go into ‘my father’s field’. The analyst believed that he had been careful not
to take sides on the matter, so he chose to remain silent in response to his
patient’s accusation. Later in the session, Mr. A told the following dream:
‘‘An earthquake had begun with just a few short bursts, but I knew that this
was just the beginning of an enormous earthquake in which I could very well
be killed. I tried to gather a few things that I would like to take with me
before getting out of the house that I was in. It was kind of like my house.
I reached for a family photograph – one that I actually have on a table in my
living room. It’s a photo I took in Florida of my parents, Karen [his wife]
and the kids. I felt an enormous pressure of time – it felt as if I was suffocat-
ing and that it was crazy to spend the last breath of air I had on saving the
photograph. Suffocation isn’t the way an earthquake gets you, but that was
how I felt. I woke up frightened with my heart pounding’’. (For reasons that
were not at all apparent to the analyst, he, too, felt intensely anxious as the
patient told the dream.)
In the course of talking about the dream, Mr. A was struck by the fact that:
‘‘because I took the photograph, I wasn’t in the picture. I was in it as an obser-
ver, not as a member of the cast’’. The analyst said: ‘‘You were initially fright-
ened by the feeling of the beginnings of an earthquake that might increase in
force to the point that it might well kill you and everything that is dear to you;
later in the dream, you felt that you were one breath away from dying by suffo-
cation. I think that you were talking with yourself and with me in the dream
about your feeling that you are being squeezed out of your own life – you were
only an observer in the family picture and yet you were willing to use your last
breath of air to preserve for yourself even that marginal place. That seemed
crazy to you even in the dream’’.

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As the analyst was saying this, it occurred to him that Mr. A, in his tell-
ing of the dream, may have been making an observation about the analyst.
The patient’s saying that he knew that he ‘‘could very well be killed’’ by the
earthquake involved a phrasing that not only used the same word on which
the analyst was focused, but also linked it directly to the idea of being
killed. This led the analyst to suspect that Mr. A was responding to some-
thing happening in the analyst that was reflected in the change in his man-
ner of speech. It seemed to him that the patient was afraid that the analyst
had developed a form of verbal tic that reflected a craziness in the analyst
that would prevent him from being the analyst that he needed. If the ana-
lyst, too, were being squeezed out of his own life as an analyst and his own
way of speaking (with which the patient had become familiar over the
years), how could the analyst be of help to him with a very similar problem?
The analyst thought that it was highly unlikely that the telling of this
dream was Mr. A’s first unconscious comment on something he perceived
to be significantly different in the analyst’s way of speaking. The patient’s
dream was critical to the analytic work, not because it was addressing feel-
ings so very different from those being addressed in other dreams, but
because it was the first time that the analyst was able to hear and respond
to what he believed to be the patient’s unconscious effort to talk to him
about his fear that he perceived an ominous change in the analyst. In retro-
spect, the source of the symptom (as the analyst came to understand it) had
affected his ability to mature as a person and as an analyst. Also in hind-
sight, the analyst recognized that the patient’s cruelly pointing out his
child’s ‘trying to act like a grown-up’ represented a communication to the
analyst regarding the patient’s self-hatred for the ways he felt like a child.
(We view the dream as a dream that cannot be ascribed to the patient alone,
but to an unconscious subject that is co-constructed by patient and analyst –
‘the analytic third’ [Ogden, 1994]. It is this third subject that dreams the
problems in the analytic relationship [in addition to the patient and analyst
as individual dreamers].)
The patient’s unconscious observation that he was an observer in the fam-
ily photo, in conjunction with the analyst’s awareness of his own anxiety
while listening to the dream, led the analyst to begin a line of thought, a
conversation with himself, about the meanings of his imitation of his first
analyst. What was most powerful about the new awareness of the speech
pattern that he had adopted was its persistence and invariability across the
full range of emotional situations and across very different kinds of conver-
sations with very different sorts of patients. It seemed to him that the imper-
sonal quality of this generic way of speaking reflected a subliminal feeling
that he had harbored for a very long time, but had not previously put into
words for himself: it had seemed to him during his first analysis (and subse-
quently) that his analyst had in some important ways perceived him in gen-
eric ways that were neither personal to him nor to the analyst. There was a
way in which he felt that his first analyst’s perception of him was unwaver-
ing and missing something important. Both of these feelings were reflected
in the photograph in the dream in that the photograph, too, was unchang-
ing and did not include the photographer. The analyst felt some disappoint-

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ment in his first analyst, but primarily felt ashamed that he had not had the
courage to consciously recognize the impersonal quality of the way he felt
he was being perceived and to register a protest. In the dream, there was a
choice between the dreamer’s saving the photograph and saving his own life.
The analyst realized that he had metaphorically chosen to save the photo-
graph – his fixed image of his own analyst – and, as a consequence, had
given up something of his own vitality.
On the basis of these thoughts and others that followed, in the succeeding
weeks and months, the analyst was eventually able to speak with Mr. A
about Mr. A’s feelings of shame (the shame of having betrayed himself) in
having chosen to pursue a career in ‘his father’s field’ and not a career in
his own field (even if it was the field in which his father also worked). (We
will return to this clinical example later in the paper.)

II. Presenting clinical material to a consultant

When struggling with a clinical situation in one’s practice, analysts fre-
quently turn to a trusted colleague. Listening to oneself in this context is
significantly different from those instances in which one speaks to patients,
students or supervisees. Analysts, in speaking with a consultant, are not
attempting to understand the other person as they would in their work with
a patient. The gradient of maturity (Loewald, 1960) tilts in the other direc-
tion in an analyst’s work with a consultant. The analyst’s insecurities and
anxieties are center stage given the fact that he has explicitly requested the
help of the consultant. The emphasis is on what the analyst does not know.
The analyst’s lack of understanding – his self-doubt, anxiety, dread, shame,
guilt, boredom, blind spots, lust, envy, hate and terror – are all exposed to
a colleague in an act of faith. The experience of one’s own limits (as an ana-
lyst and as a person), and the acceptance of those limits by the consultant,
help shape the analyst’s identity in the direction of humility, curiosity about
himself, and the awareness that his own analysis is a lifelong task. A portion
of the analyst’s identity involves conflict, ambivalence, longings and fears
from childhood, and an attempt to come to terms with the fact that the
analyst’s personal analysis has not allowed him to transcend the internal
torment that drew him to analytic work in the first place. Moreover, the fact
that the consultant does not recoil in response to the analyst’s struggles pro-
vides confirmation that being ‘‘good enough’’, in Winnicott’s (1951, p. 237)
terms, is acceptable to others and that the analyst will inevitably fall short
of the comprehensive understanding and therapeutic results for which he
may strive.
Aspects of the analyst’s lived experience exceed his capacity to do psycho-
logical work with them and often emerge in the context of his encounters
with his patients. Seeking out consultation may provide a much needed con-
tainer when an analyst finds it impossible to process what he is confronting
both in himself and in his patients. One of us (Gabbard) worked for years
with a relentlessly suicidal patient who continued to plan her suicide despite
the analyst’s best efforts to understand, contain and interpret the multiple
motives and meanings involved in the wish to die.

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After the analyst presented this dilemma to a consultant, the consultant

noted that the analyst was attempting to ward off the idea that all his well-
intentioned efforts were likely to come to naught, and the patient would
probably end her life in spite of the treatment. The consultant stressed that
the analyst was exasperated with the patient’s interpersonally enacted fan-
tasy of having omnipotent control over him and with his own inability to
accept his powerlessness to prevent the patient from committing suicide.
Ultimately, suicide would be the patient’s choice without regard to the ana-
lyst’s desires or needs. Hearing the consultant’s comments allowed the ana-
lyst to work with these frightening thoughts and provided a way of
detoxifying them so they could actually be thought by the analyst, accepted
as inherent to the treatment situation, and heard as a communication of the
patient’s own feeling of not having a say about her own life or death.
The analyst’s mind had been colonized by the patient’s internal world
and, as that colonization diminished, the analyst became aware of how his
own aspirations for the analytic enterprise were being thwarted by the
patient’s unwavering death-wish (Gabbard, 2003). Like many analysts, he
harbored a powerful unconscious fantasy regarding the analytic relationship
– one in which a specific form of object relationship would be generated.
He would be the devoted, selfless healer, and the patient would progressively
improve and ultimately express gratitude to the analyst for his help (Gab-
bard, 2000). His suicidal patient had not agreed to this unconscious con-
tract, and her march towards self-destruction continued on in spite of – or
perhaps oblivious to – the analyst’s wish to help. With further reflection,
the analyst recognized that he had been relegated to a transference position
that would later be described by Steiner (2008) as the excluded observer
who resents the fact that he is not the primary object for the patient.
The consultation also freed up the analyst to reflect on resonances from
earlier developmental experiences where he realized his powerlessness in the
face of the inevitable decline and death of others and himself, an important
unconscious determinant of his career choice. Looking squarely at his magi-
cal wishes, and recognizing the impossibility of determining what another
human being (or himself) ultimately will do constituted pivotal elements of
the maturation of the analyst. Part of knowing who one is as an analyst is
knowing the limits of one’s power to influence a patient and using that
knowledge to be able to listen and respond to a patient who confronts her
own limits (as well as those of the analyst).

III. One’s analytic work as a principal medium for self-analysis

Every analysis is incomplete. As Freud (1937) stressed, termination is
ordinarily a practical matter rather than a definitively determined endpoint
marked by conflict resolution. It is widely accepted now that we do not
‘terminate’ an analysis (with a belief that we have helped the patient achieve
a ‘complete’ analysis); rather the patient and analyst end an experience in
analysis at a point at which they feel that a significant piece of psychological
work has been achieved and that they are at a juncture at which the princi-
pal work at hand feels to them to be that of their separation. Put still

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differently: transference is interminable, countertransference is interminable,

conflict is interminable. A generative experience in analysis sets a process in
motion that will continue throughout the analyst’s life.
The analyst’s self-analysis serves a contrapuntal function to the dialogue
one has with a trusted consultant. The interpersonal experience of working
with the consultant is punctuated by periods of isolation in which one
thinks one’s own thoughts in the quiet of one’s car, in the wee hours of the
morning when one is staring at the ceiling, or in the privacy of one’s
consulting room while waiting for a patient who does not appear. Psycho-
analytic treatment initiates an exploration – often tentative and ambivalent –
of the inner life of both patient and analyst. Self-analysis contributes to that
process, but in this variation one works alone, determined to look unflinch-
ingly at what one finds, but always falling short of the mark. From this per-
spective, the ending of an analysis, the ‘end’ of a piece of self-analytic work
or of analytic work with a consultant is not the point at which unconscious
conflict is resolved, but the point at which the subject of the analytic work
is able to think and dream his experience (to a large degree) for himself.

IV. Discovering ⁄ creating what one thinks and who one is in the
experience of writing
Writing is a form of thinking. Very often, in writing, one does not write
what one thinks; one thinks what one writes. There is something of the feel-
ing that ideas come out of one’s pen, of watching ideas develop in
unplanned ways (Ogden, 2005). Writing, however, is not necessarily a soli-
tary activity. In psychoanalytic writing there is often a reader in mind as
one proceeds. The fantasy of how the reader will react to a turn of phrase
or a radical new perspective on theory or technique shapes and influences
what appears on the page. Yet much of the creative process develops in iso-
lation as one thinks about the kernel of an idea over and over in different
settings. This contemplative period may take days, weeks, or even years.
Most writing involves some oscillation between, on the one hand, quiet
reflection on what one has to say, and on imagined responses by potential
readers, on the other. An imaginary audience is a fixture in Freud’s writing.
Time and again, he invents an imaginary skeptical audience and masterfully
anticipates the objections of the audience ⁄ reader to his argument and offers
a compelling rebuttal.
When the text is co-authored, further complexity is introduced into the
process. In addition to the solitary contemplation and the imagined inter-
action with a reader, a collaboration with another writer requires a special
sensitivity to one’s co-author – after all, each sentence must represent two
authors, not one.
One such example of collaboration emerged in the course of writing this
paper. We began with a shared idea – namely, an updating of Freud’s idea
that what was definitive of analysis as a treatment for psychological prob-
lems is the grounding of the work in the understanding of transference and
resistance (Freud, 1914). We planned to describe how our own definition of
analysis has evolved from and ⁄ or is discontinuous with Freud’s 1914 ideas.

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 On becoming a psychoanalyst 321

We began our work on this collaborative project with enthusiasm. However,

we found that the words did not flow as freely as we had hoped from either
of us.
Feeling stuck in our efforts to get things moving, we re-read and studied
Freud’s 1914 text. We were singularly disappointed as we came to recognize
that much of Freud’s paper was a rather vitriolic polemic against Jung’s
departures from Freud’s theoretical premises and a fierce insistence that he
and he alone was the founder of psychoanalysis. Hence we came to under-
stand that the defensiveness in Freud’s tone was a reflection of his insecuri-
ties regarding competing claims of authorship of his idea (i.e. of
psychoanalysis as a discipline) and a fear that Jung would subvert what he
had invented and continue to call it psychoanalysis. We had picked a quota-
tion that caught Freud at an inauspicious moment in the history of his own
psychological maturation.
As our enthusiasm waned, we had to re-think the theme of our paper.
We traded revisions back and forth until we began to clarify that what
was most pressing to us was not the task of proposing a contemporary defi-
nition of psychoanalysis. Rather the collaboration itself had served to clarify
for each of us how we had evolved as analysts over 30 years of practice. We
talked at length with one another about how each of us had come to his
current, evolving sense of himself as a psychoanalyst. Our developmental
experiences in the course of analytic training and in the early years after-
wards were markedly different in some respects, and yet we found that there
was great overlap in how we conceived of the way we work and who we are
as psychoanalysts. Although we have known one another for more than
20 years, we found that we came to know one another in a new way in the
course of these discussions. But with regard to the task of deciding what we
hoped to achieve in co-authoring a paper, talking alone was not sufficient.
Only by our repeated efforts to write our thoughts (or, more accurately, to
allow ourselves to see what we thought in the very act of writing), we were
eventually able to discern what it was that we wanted to attempt. Putting
words to the page forced us (and freed us) to transform inchoate thoughts
and feelings into concepts and an idea of what it was that we wanted to
communicate in the form of a co-authored analytic paper.
In thinking about how readers might respond to our perspective, we rec-
ognized that our maturational experiences might not be shared by other
analysts. We certainly did not want to be prescriptive in our tone. We thus
made a concerted effort to present our ideas as simply a description of our
own experiences rather than suggesting that they are universal. We became
clearer with ourselves that among the qualities of an analyst that we view as
most important is the way in which an analyst makes use of what is unique
and idiosyncratic to his or her personality.
Working with a co-author also involves an experience of having a built-in
editor or consultant (whether or not one wants one) who can offer an ‘out-
side’ perspective on the other author’s clinical material. In the course of our
collaboration on this paper, one of us (Ogden) sent a draft of the paper to
his co-author containing the clinical vignette presented above involving the
earthquake dream. The co-author (Gabbard) responded (in written form)

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322 G. O. Gabbard and T. H. Ogden

with the following thoughts about the case in general, and the dream in
particular:
I very much agree with your point that the dream cannot be ascribed to the patient
alone, but to a co-constructed subject. I felt that the dream was as much yours as
his. My fantasy about the dream is this: that even though you had perceived your
analyst as treating you in a generic manner, you felt some sort of protection – a
safe harbor, if you will – in resorting to his style of speaking. In doing so, you had
not separated from him and thus did not have to bear the pain associated with the
loss of him. I am reminded of Freud’s famous comment that the only way the ego
can give up an object is to take it within. The earthquake, then, could be seen as a
growing awareness in the patient that you were about to be ripped from your inter-
nally created house – i.e. the safe harbor of your analyst’s office or internalized
presence – and cast into a world where you must speak in your own voice. At some
level, the patient felt that way about being ripped from his father’s ‘house’. What
was going on in you had a great deal of resonance with what was going on in him.
I did not add this to the paper because it is purely my own conjecture and may not
fit with your experience.
As this quotation indicates, a co-author’s perspective on clinical material
must then be filtered through the thoughts of the author providing the clini-
cal data in order to see if it is ‘a good fit’ with the actual analytic moment
described.
Ogden, who was not used to such ‘interference’ with his writing process,
found himself feeling unsettled by Gabbard’s unexpected comments. He
required more than two months of ‘sleeping on’ (dreaming) what had been
elicited in him by Gabbard’s note before he was able to offer a considered
response (also in written form):
On rereading my account of my work with Mr. A, I find it telling that I saw in the
invariability of the photograph in the patient’s dream only stasis, as opposed to reli-
ability; and that I saw in the absence of the photographer in the photograph only
the absence of a thinking ⁄ feeling person, as opposed to unobtrusiveness. Your com-
ments on the vignette helped me to see what had been there all along in my writing
of the account: my deep appreciation of what I feel to be two of my first analyst’s
best qualities – his willingness to remain emotionally present during trying times in
the analysis and during very difficult times in his life; and his ability to ‘stay out of
the way’ (and not reflexively make transference interpretations) when I was doing
psychological work on my own in the sessions.
The co-authors view the emotional experience that Ogden describes as a
current response both to his memory of his work with Mr. A and to Gab-
bard’s comments on his written account of that experience. This exchange
between the co-authors constitutes a type of maturational experience that
was of value to both authors.

V. Daring to improvise
With each patient, we have the responsibility to become an analyst whom
we have never been before. This requires that we drop the script and enter
into a conversation, a conversation of a type we have never before experi-
enced (Hoffman, 1998; Ringstrom, 2001). This may take the form of

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 On becoming a psychoanalyst 323

responding to a patient’s mention of a film by saying: ‘‘There’s hardly a

word spoken in the entire film, at least that’s how it left me feeling’’. With
another patient, improvising may mean remaining silent – not complying
with implicit coercive demands for reassurance or even for the sound of our
voice. Improvisation is, of course, a theatrical metaphor. The great Russian
acting teacher, Konstantin Stanislavski, once noted:
The very best that can happen is to have the actor completely carried away by the
play. Then regardless of his own will he lives the part, not noticing how he feels,
not thinking about what he does, and it all moves of its own accord subconsciously
and intuitively.
(Stanislavski, 1936, p. 13)
In an analogous way, maturation as an analyst involves increasingly allow-
ing ourselves to be caught up in the moment (in the unconscious of the
analysis) and carried by the music of the session. Analysis is not an experi-
ence that can be mapped out and planned. Events happen between two peo-
ple in a room together, and the meaning of those events are discussed and
understood. Analysts learn more about who they are by participating in the
‘dance’ of the moment. The extent to which the analysis is ‘alive’ may
depend on the analyst’s willingness and ability to improvise, and to be
improvised by, the unconscious of the analytic relationship.

VI. Noticing the aspects of ourselves which, as if of their own

accord, protest against our being the analyst whom we have been
for so long
What at one time might have been called being reliable, stable and trustwor-
thy, may gradually become too easy and more than a little stale and predict-
able. We, at times, become aware during a session with a patient that we
have become too comfortable with ourselves as analysts. ‘Errors’, in these
sessions, can often be seen as expressions of the healthiest parts of ourselves
and are invaluable to our maturation if we can make use of these alerts.
Such ‘errors’ include the analyst’s arriving late for a session, ending a ses-
sion early, falling asleep during a session, and expecting a different patient
when one meets the analysand in the waiting room. (Not included in this
type of error are boundary violations such as having sex with patients,
breaches of confidentiality, entering into a business relationship with a
patient, and so on [Gabbard and Lester, 1995].) The errors that do not
involve boundary violations very often represent the analyst’s unconscious
efforts to disturb his own psychic equilibrium, to force himself to take
notice of the ways in which he has become stagnant in his role as analyst.
We believe that there is a self-imposed need to be original – not in the
sense of a narcissistic display, but in the sense of a need to quietly, steadily,
unselfconsciously enter into conversation with the patient or supervisee in a
way that could happen between no other two people in the world (Ogden,
2004a). If this is forced, it quickly reveals itself to be an empty contrivance.
The development of an ‘‘analytic style’’ (Ogden, 2007, p. 1185) that is expe-
rienced as fully authentic is part of an ongoing effort on the part of every
analyst to become an analyst in his or her own right. One can achieve this

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324 G. O. Gabbard and T. H. Ogden

sense of having become ‘original’ only through a painstaking effort to shed,

over time, the shackles of orthodoxy, tradition and one’s own unconscious
irrational prohibitions (Gabbard, 2007). The analyst’s struggle with theory
as master or servant may be an integral part of this effort. We share the
view of Sandler (1983) that each analyst develops a private amalgam or
mixed model borrowing from certain aspects of various theories that are
consistent with one’s own subjectivity and one’s own approach to analysis.
At the same time we concur with Bion’s notion that the analyst must endea-
vor to forget what he thinks he knows or knows ‘too well’ in order to be
able to learn from his current experience with the patient. Bion (1987) once
said to a presenter: ‘‘I would [rely on theory only] … if I were tired and had
no idea what was going on …’’ (p. 58).

VII. Keeping one’s eyes open to the way one is maturing ⁄ growing
old
As one ages, one is able to speak from experience in a way that one could
not previously have done. Often one becomes aware, after the fact, that one
has changed, for example, through listening to oneself speak to one’s
patient. Optimally, the analyst engages in a mourning process in which the
loss of youth and the inevitability of old age and death are recognized,
accepted and even embraced as a new form of coming into being as a per-
son leading an examined life. The analyst may, in this way, achieve a greater
appreciation for the patient’s experiences of loss and the ways in which he
has handled or evaded them.
This maturational process occurs both within and outside the analytic set-
ting. The analyst who shows up each day in the consulting room is (ideally)
never entirely the same analyst who showed up the previous day. An ana-
lyst’s capacity to fully grasp a patient’s grief may be limited until the analyst
himself has navigated his own grief associated with the loss of loved ones
and the endings of important periods of his life, for example, the era in
which his children are living at home or the era in which his parents are
alive.

VIII. Difficulties in becoming an analyst

The reasons why an analyst may fear ‘growing up’ as an analyst, and the
ways in which he may defend himself against such fears, are legion. In this
brief paper, we cannot list, much less explore, these fears and defenses. In
the following paragraph, we will offer a few examples of the analyst’s flight
from potential maturational experiences and forms of defense against such
experiences.
The analyst may be afraid that he is so insubstantial as a person that it is
not possible for him to develop a voice of his own; or be frightened of the
isolation that he imagines will come with his becoming an analyst in his
own terms; or fear that with a mature recognition of uncertainty will come
unbearable confusion. An analyst may defend himself against these fears
and others by engaging in adolescent rebellion against ‘the analytic estab-
lishment’ in an effort to avoid defining himself in his own terms; or by

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 On becoming a psychoanalyst 325

speaking early on with a contrived voice of experience when he, in fact, feels
painfully lacking as a consequence of his inexperience; or by embracing false
certainty in the form of an intense identification with a given school of
psychoanalysis, with his own analyst, with an idealized analytic writer and
so on. Finally, we must remember that, as much as we love analysis, a part
of us hates it as well (Steiner, 2000). Dedication to ongoing analytic work
(on ourselves and with patients) consigns us not only to uncertainty, but
also to face what we least like about ourselves and others.

Concluding comments
In this paper, we have discussed some of our maturational experiences and
viewed them from several theoretical perspectives. Some readers will recognize
something of their own experiences of maturing as analysts in what we have
described, while others will not. Indeed, a recurring theme in our essay has
been that speaking in generic terms to patients, colleagues and students is
anti-analytic (in the sense of representing a failure to think and speak for one-
self). As Bion (1987) notes in the comment cited at the beginning of this paper,
part of becoming an analyst is to evolve in a direction that is neither bound
by theory nor driven exclusively by identification with others: ‘‘The analyst
you become is you and you alone – that is what you use …’’ (p. 15). Analytic
discourse involves what is unique, idiosyncratic and alive in the particular
experience of a given individual. Becoming an analyst necessarily involves cre-
ating a highly personal identity that is unlike that of any other analyst.
We cannot overstate the difficulty of attempting to live by this ideal. The
conscious and unconscious ties that we have to what we think we know are
powerful. But the struggle to overcome these ties (at least to a significant
degree) is what we ask of ourselves in each session. It has been our experi-
ence that, when the analyst is off balance, he does his best analytic work.

Translations of summary
Psychoanalytiker werden. In den Jahren der Praxis, die auf den Abschluss der offiziellen analytischen
Ausbildung folgen, hat man die Gelegenheit und die Pflicht, zu dem Analytiker zu werden, der man wer-
den wollte. Die Autoren diskutieren ihr Verstndnis von Reifungserfahrungen, die dazu beigetragen ha-
ben, dass sie zu den Analytikern wurden, die sie werden wollten. Sie glauben, dass das wichtigste
Element des Prozesses, in dem sie zu Analytikern heranreiften, die Entwicklung der Fhigkeit war, ihre
unverwechselbaren und individuellen Eigenschaften zu nutzen; in seinen besten Momenten verhlt sich je-
der von ihnen als Analytiker auf eine Weise, die seinen eigenen Analysestil, seine Art, mit seinen Patien-
ten zusammen zu sein und zu sprechen, seine Form der psychoanalytischen Praxis widerspiegelt. Die
Reifungserfahrungen, die die Autoren untersuchen, umfassen Situationen, in denen sie gelernt haben, sich
selbst beim Sprechen mit ihren Patienten zuzuhçren und dabei eine eigene Stimme zu entwickeln; Wach-
stumserfahrungen, die sie machten, wenn sie einem Berater klinisches Material vorstellten; den selbstanal-
ytischen Gebrauch ihrer Erfahrungen mit ihren Patienten; die Erschaffung ⁄ Entdeckung ihrer selbst als
Analytiker in der Erfahrung des Verfassens analytischer Texte (mit besonderer Aufmerksamkeit fr die
Reifungserfahrung, die im Schreiben des vorliegenden Beitrags impliziert ist); und die Reaktion auf
die Notwendigkeit, vernderungsfhig zu bleiben und sich ein originales Denken und Verhalten als
Analytiker zu bewahren.

Sobre volverse psicoanalista. Uno tiene la oportunidad y la responsabilidad de volverse analista en

sus propios trminos en el curso de los aÇos de prctica que siguen a la culminacin de la formacin
analtica formal. Los autores discuten su comprensin acerca de algunas experiencias de maduracin que
han contribuido a que se vuelvan psicoanalistas en sus propios trminos. Ellos consideran que el factor
ms importante en el proceso de su maduracin como analistas ha sido el desarrollo de la capacidad de

ª 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90

326 G. O. Gabbard and T. H. Ogden
aprovechar lo que es fflnico e idiosincrtico en cada uno; en sus mejores momentos, cada uno se conduce
como analista de una manera que refleja su propio estilo analtico, su propia manera de ser con el pa-
ciente y hablar con l, su propia forma de practicar el psicoanlisis. El tipo de experiencia de maduracin
que los autores examinan comprende situaciones en las que han aprendido a escucharse a s mismos ha-
blar con sus pacientes, y al hacerlo han empezado a desarrollar una voz propia, experiencias de crecimi-
ento que han ocurrido en el contexto de la presentacin de material clnico a un especialista, el
aprovechamiento del autoanlisis de sus experiencias con sus pacientes, el crearse ⁄ descubrirse a s
mismos como analistas en la experiencia de la escritura psicoanaltica (con particular atencin en las
experiencias de maduracin presentes en la escritura de este artculo), y responder a una necesidad de
continuar cambiando, ser originales en sus ideas y comportamientos como analistas.

Devenir psychanalyste. On a la possibilit et la responsabilit de devenir le psychanalyste que l’on est

au cours des annes de pratique qui suivent l’ach vement du cursus de formation analytique. Les auteurs
de cet article discutent de la faÅon dont certaines de leurs expriences de maturation les ont conduits

devenir les psychanalystes qu’ils sont. Ils pensent que l’lment qui a jou le rle le plus important dans
ce processus de maturation a trait au dveloppement de la capacit d’utiliser ce que chacun a d’unique et
d’idiosyncrasique. Chacun, lorsqu’il est au sommet de sa forme, voit son comportement en tant qu’analy-
ste reflter son propre style analytique; sa propre faÅon d’Þtre et de parler avec ses patients; sa propre fa-
Åon de pratiquer la psychanalyse. Les expriences de maturation que ces auteurs tudient englobent des
situations o ils ont appris
s’couter eux-mÞmes lorsqu’ils parlent
leurs patients et ont pu, gr ce

cela, commencer
dvelopper leur propre voix. Ces situations, synonymes de croissance, ont trait
la
prsentation de matriel clinique
un consultant,
l’utilisation auto-analytique de leur exprience avec
les patients,
la cration ⁄ dcouverte de leur fonctionnement en tant qu’analystes
travers le travail
d’criture (avec une attention particuli re porte
l’exprience de maturation lie
l’criture du prsent
article),
la ncessit de rpondre
un besoin constant de changement et d’avoir une pense et une
attitude originales en tant qu’analystes.

Del divenire psicoanalista. Questo articolo tratta delle opportunit

e responsabilit
di sviluppare la
propria specifica identit
di psicoanalista durante gli anni che seguono la formazione psicoanalitica. Gli
autori mettono a confronto alcune delle loro esperienze che hanno maggiormente contribuito all’appro-
fondimento e allo sviluppo della loro identit
di psicoanalista. Sono convinti che il fattore principale in
tale processo formativo sia lo sviluppo della capacit
di sfruttare ci che unico e specifico nella loro
personalit
. Gli autori ritengono di offrire il meglio di s stessi quando conducono l’analisi in un modo
che rifletta il loro stile personale, il loro modo di essere e di comunicare con i pazienti e la loro interpret-
azione personale della prassi psicoanalitica. Fra le esperienze maturative esaminate nel lavoro si annover-
ano: situazioni in cui gli autori hanno imparato ad ascoltare la loro comunicazione con i pazienti,
cogliendo in tal modo l’opportunit
di sviluppare una voce propria; esperienze di crescita verificatesi nel
presentare materiale clinico in consultazione; l’uso auto-analitico della propria esperienza con i pazienti;
la creazione ⁄ scoperta di se stessi in veste di analisti nell’atto di scrittura psicoanalitica (particolare atten-
zione stata rivolta proprio all’esperienza formativa vissuta scrivendo il presente articolo); il prestare at-
tenzione al bisogno di evolvere costantemente e di mantenere una propria originalit
di pensiero e di
comportamento nella prassi psicoanalitica.

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