In a continuation of last month’s post, and in anticipation of the Manhattan Institute’s first ever Roundtable Discussion on Psychoanalytic Training colloquium on January 11, 2019, we hear from more faculty, graduates, and candidates on why they decided to become analysts and what they learned from their training that they still refer to in their work today.

Cynthia Chalker, LCSW:
I was drawn to this training by the intellectual rigor, theory and practice of interpersonal psychoanalysis. This type of training dovetailed with my various careers that often involved relating to people and organizations in micro and macro ways to bring about change. During my training, I was fascinated by the history of the profession, its evolution and the excitement to be part of the changes to come in the field.

Because I didn’t have a clinical background when I began training, it was incumbent upon me to learn the ways psychoanalysis can be applied outside the consulting room. Having gone through this training, I incorporate theory and practice that informs my work and expands the profession to include people historically overlooked in the practice of psychoanalysis.

Rob Levin, LCSW:
I think I became an analyst because I wanted the part of me that was very curious about life and about people to win over the side of me that was terrified of them. My brother bought me Playing in Reality and The Interpretation of Dreams when I was 19 and that began a long search and discovery for books that could tell me more about who I was. I knew that if I could make a profession out of learning about people, their emotional lives, what we all share as humans, in our struggles and in our joys, I could feel a part of a larger humanity. Needless to say I felt very much like an outsider for many years of my life.

I wanted to connect to people and offer them something. Little did I know that psychoanalysis was a way for me to save myself from feeling lonely. I connected to people’s problems more than to people’s successes and I wanted to be a healing part of that. Perhaps a darker side is that I wanted to also feel like I had an edge on people by knowing something about psychology in a way that they didn’t. There is no doubt in my mind that I became an analyst so that I would heal myself through this profession.

The thing in my training that was most useful to me was the realization of how vulnerable I felt in the role of a patient and how necessary that is to remember when I work with people. In listening to others’ presentations in class I remember always siding with the patient.

Irina Simidchieva, LMSW:
I am an artist, a therapist and a psychoanalytic candidate. Those three professions are very interrelated for me and one of them led to the other and made me pursue it. I have European training. In Bulgaria, I graduated from a graduate social work program, which had a strong psychoanalytic inclination but also just as strongly leaned towards the use of creative, expressive therapeutic methods. It had a distinct focus on artistic action approaches, like psychodrama and action methods in combination with the psychodynamic perspective, while at the same time it met all requirements for a graduate social work program. I started the program as an artist seeking further development. Then, as I gradually got to know more about what psychotherapy/psychoanalysis is and find the many commonalities between art and psychoanalysis, I graduated firmly convinced that I wanted to become a therapist. I preserved my interest in psychoanalytic theory and after I moved to the USA I decided to become an analyst.

What am I getting from analytic training? The challenge is the type of experience I am gaining. I currently work in a clinic as a therapist, have a busy caseload (more than thirty sessions per week), and see patients twice and three times a week. I work with culturally and socially diverse populations and various age groups, patients with different levels of functioning and mental health statuses, including trauma and PTSD, psychosis and serious mental illness, diagnosed with heavy mental and developmental illnesses and inhibitions, anxiety and depression, addictions and eating disorders. Despite the fact that the intense clinical work challenges me in coping with my own feelings and dealing with burnout, I could not imagine doing anything else besides analytic training. All aspects of it, the theoretical part, the intense three times a week analysis and the deep, detailed and intimate supervision help me not only learn analytic technique, but also to know more about myself. I am open and learn from my patients, learning things about myself with every encounter. I chose MIP because of the atmosphere of acceptance and openness to diversity, but also because at MIP I am able to explore the many different schools of psychoanalytic thought while at the same time I have the freedom to develop my own analytic style without being told what to think.

Roberto Colangeli, PhD:
I was about ten years old when my favorite aunt began a psychoanalytic treatment in Italy. Before that, I remember her being sad and depressed, crying most of the time. Over the next four years, I witnessed my aunt’s transformation from sad and depressed to radiant and full of life. I thought about psychoanalysis as the “white magic” of the 20th century. Years later the same “white magic” worked on myself when I began a treatment at the age of 17. I wanted to be a part of something that could bring about such profound and positive change in people.

It is hard to think about one thing I learned during my training since I learned so many different things. I will always remember a sentence that my therapist told me at the beginning of my training analysis: “A therapist can go with his patients only as far as he went in his own analysis.”

Steve Kirschner, LCSW:
I first heard about psychoanalysis when my high school girlfriend told me to read R.D. Laing. That introduced me to the British work of Klein, Fairbairn and Winnicott. In art school I read Jung and Kohut. It wasn’t until later in life when shaken by some big losses and faced with major decisions I decided to seek analysis for myself. It was an extraordinary experience that changed the direction of my life. It wasn’t long before I knew that becoming an analyst and having the opportunity to do this kind of work with others was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was helped along in my decision by a dream I had while in analysis in which Erik Erikson visited me and told me, “You’d be good at this.” I’m not kidding.

I learned many valuable lessons during my training from teachers and supervisors, but at the risk of sounding cliche I have to say I learned the most profound things from my patients.

Justine Duhr, MFA:
As a writer, I’ve always been interested in what makes people tick. In my work as a writing coach (my husband and I have run a writers’ service, WriteByNight, for the past ten years), I discovered that what was most fulfilling for me was seeing my clients overcome the obstacles that had been holding them back creatively. That realization in combination with my own experiences in therapy over the years led me to search for a way to expand that helping work beyond writing. Psychoanalysis was it.

What I keep learning and relearning in my training is just how unbelievably impossibly beautifully complicated people are.

Read Part I of this post here!

Join us for our next colloquium, More Simply Clinical Than Otherwise: A Roundtable Discussion on Psychoanalytic Training, with Sandra Buechler, PhD, Steve Kirschner, LCSW, and Jamieson Webster, PhD

Friday, January 11, at 8 p.m.

NYU Kimmel Center 60 Washington Square South at La Guardia Place ROOM #808

For 2 CEUs, please make $40 payment HERE
To attend without CEUs, suggested $20 at the door; please RSVP HERE

If you enjoyed this post, we recommend:
Why Psychoanalysis? by Irwin Hirsch, PhD