Self-Analysis ― Critical Inquiries, Personal Visions

Self-Analysis: Critical Inquiries, Personal Visions is a fascinating reprise on the mode of disciplined self-inquiry that gave rise to psychoanalysis. From Freud's pioneering self-analytic efforts onward, self-analysis has been central to psychoanalytic training and psychoanalytic practice. Yet, only in recent years have analysts turned their attention to this wellspring of Freud's creation.
The resurgence of interest in self-analysis is part of what editor James Barron terms a "quiet revolution" that has taken place within the field. For Freud and several generations of followers, the analyst functioned as the detached, neutral observer of the patient's psychic reality. Self-analysis thus had an important but limited function: it enabled the analyst to understand, and thereby overcome, the countertransferences that occasionally disrupted the neutral processing of the patient's free associations. Contemporary analysts have moved far beyond this model; they now understand the analyst's active, ongoing engagement with the patient as an integral part of the analytic endeavor. Allied with this appreciation of the analyst's participation in the therapeutic process is a corresponding emphasis on the analyst's need to monitor continuously his or her own psychic reality, especially the thoughts, feelings, and fantasies elicited by the patient. Self-analysis, viewed as a process that both parallels and shapes the analytic inquiry into the patient's inner world, has thus acquired a domain far greater than Freud envisioned.
The contributors to Self-Analysis represent diverse theoretical perspectives, but they share a common appreciation of the importance of self-analysis to the analytic endeavor. Their papers encompass systematic inquiries into the capacity for self-analysis, examples of self-analysis as an aspect of clinical work, and personal reflections on the role of self-analysis in professional growth. Among the questions explored: What do we mean by self-analysis? To what extent and under what conditions is self-analysis possible? How does it differ from ordinary introspection? What are the developmental antecedents of the capacity for self-analysis? What is the role of the "other" in self-analysis? What are the relationships among self-analysis, writing, and creativity? As editor Barron observes, the contributors to the book "grapple with the formidable ambiguities of self-analysis without either idealizing or devaluing its potential." What emerges from their effort is not only an illuminating window into the psychoanalyst's subjectivity as a fact of clinical life, but a far-reaching exemplification of the ways in which self-understanding is always a constitutive part of our understanding of others.

A graduate and faculty member of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East, James W. Barron, Ph.D., has broad interests in psychoanalytic education. Past president of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the APA, the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education, Dr. Barron is editor of the Psychologist Psychoanalyst and coeditor of the volume Interface of Psychoanalysis and Psychology (1992). He maintains a private practice and is an Instructor in Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.