A must-read for the holidays, Analysis Now brings you “Like Waltzing Around in Underpants: Living the Dream of Analytic Candidacy” by fourth-year candidate Tricia Brock. Tricia takes a fresh approach to expressing the anxieties of entering the field and what it means to become a psychoanalyst.

See you at the holiday party!

 

The twinkling holiday party unfurls predictably with handfuls of happy people exchanging polite conversation. Shoulder to shoulder with faculty, candidates and friends of my institute, all glamorously decked out in sequins and bowties, I begin to panic. It’s not an evening of hobnobbing with psychoanalytic forbearers that horrifies me, it’s my outfit, which has slowly crept into awareness: gem-colored silk blouse, blinding diamond jewelry and—underpants!

I make the smart move: I play it cool. Avoiding eye contact with my analyst—like everyone else does—I casually moonwalk over to the appetizer table.

Who is that important-looking, wizardly man I recognize, chomping down a handful of mixed nuts while performing live supervision with a candidate? He sports the same birds-nest eyebrows as my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Kind. Wait—how did I not know Mr. Kind was a founding father of my institute?

I wonder intrusively: Who analyzes Mr. Kind? Does he still visit his training analyst from forty years ago, or has he moved on to a second because that one died? Were both analyses successes? Who determines analytic failure? Why isn’t analytic DNA mapped out on our website, where one may select training analyst and supervisors based on theoretical ancestry?

The most pressing information weighing on me tonight is too heavy for friendly chitchat. C, my first-ever patient, a woman complicated with angry highs and ruinous lows, has ambiguously terminated after four years, and worse, I let her go without a fight. I plod around the party feeling abandoned and defeated, hoping nobody notices me despite my daring look.

I don’t disclose how I may be a tad relieved that my most challenging hour to date has freed up on my calendar for self-reflection only because I pushed down something too uncomfortable in our analytic togetherness. “The analyst’s hate is often engendered by the very things the patient does in his crude way of loving” (Winnicott, 1949).

At first, C overlooked my knitted brow and knowing half-nod, but became malevolently perceptive at my expense, increasingly inconsolable and ultimately hateful. Still, I hope that one day when I am much better at this work C will return, my lost lamb, flashing her radiant and defiant smile and provide a healing opportunity—for me!

Not only would I better contain her alternating fits of rage and despair, this time I would also share her impact on me with laser-precision timing: the next time she laughs at me and I don’t feel like laughing; the moment she again brags of belittling her meek husband and I get reduced for naming the pleasure it appears to give her; and right before she discards her best friend permanently so that she isn’t abandoned first. All this using one little word offered by Heather Ferguson in class this year: Ouch.

If I could figure out how to react genuinely maybe C could finally take in some of my abundant tenderness, which she routinely dismissed as superfluous or nonexistent—rendering me superfluous and nonexistent in the room with her. She rejected my faltering attempts to comfort her. And she called me quirky. Oh, Winnicott, how the patient’s hate may be engendered by the terrible ways the analyst tries to love!

Miraculously, I am not escorted away from the festivities for insanity. No one cares about my flowered granny panties. I toast with my peers that I, too, have met most of our training requirements, but I choke back my ambivalence about continuing with M.

It usually feels right to interrupt M, but not on days I notice him checking me out. I can’t imagine any acknowledgment not sounding seductive, or simply muster a neutral: I see that you’re taking me in. Do I tell myself that M’s occasional glance at my chest or my legs or my wrists doesn’t seem sexual out of some co-created pact? Is he feeding on my concrete need for our work in order to graduate (Hirsch, 2008)? Or is he childlike and am I maternal?

It’s difficult to locate M’s affect, a helpful point of reference in the murky waters of any treatment—an emotional fishing technique one supervisor champions. All too easily I accept, even encourage his deadening, preferring that to his potential embarrassment, possibly also to keep from drowning in my own intolerable feelings of repulsion and subsequent guilt, or worse, narcissistic flattery. All I have to do is admit to M that I see him seeing me. Maybe then the ineffable will happen and our feelings emerge. Or maybe I’ll just be sitting there in my underpants.

In my final year of formal training, I am not only not confident, I am bumbling. I have forged connections and made mistakes. I have loved and lost. In every case the only constant is that I feel I have little idea what I’m doing, and this perspective is supposedly right on point.

The not-knowing is the beauty of the work, my analyst sighs, and I want to bean him with a cushion. All I need to do is get even more uncomfortable to be more fully alive in the presence of another. Easy-peasy.

There is no such thing as being fully analyzed, my supervisor chuckles. I will never stop reading, learning and exploring, and twenty years down the road my analytic style may still be at best a good hunch.

Our lovely institute co-director, Monica Bellucci, taps a butter knife on the side of her champagne flute, drawing the crowd’s attention to the front of the room where awaits our other co-director, Ben Kingsley, dashing in a tuxedo jacket, bowtie, and—underpants.

They begin to waltz.

 

Tricia Brock, MFA, is a candidate in the license-qualifying program at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is co-chair of SCOOP, MIP’s Student Cooperative.

 

References

Hirsch, I. (2008). Coasting in the Countertransference: Conflicts of Self Interest between Analyst and Patient. Mahwah, NJ, US: Analytic Press.

Winnicott, D.W. (1949). Hate in the Counter-Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 30:69-74.

 

 

 

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