The Metapsychology of the Analyst

Of the two persons involved in the analytic situation, one, customarily not considered a problem, is the object of this brief metapsychologic study. While in the course of the analytic procedure, the patient, gradually sloughing off the personality epitomized in his diagnosis, moves towards becoming truly an individual, the analyst remains from beginning to end what he always is while at work: essentially a “categorical person.” It is this person that we shall attempt to describe by subjecting him to as close a scrutiny as the present state of our theory warrants. The psychoanalyst is molded out of the raw material presented by the individual who intends to devote himself to the calling. Our educational recipe directs us to select a physician with mental health, psychiatric training, and psychological aptitude. After completing a training analysis, lectures and seminars, he will be able to analyze patients, although he will for a while need our periodic advice. Everything in the curriculum of this student consists, as in any other curriculums of professional training, in imparting rational knowledge and experience. Even the training analysis can here hardly be considered as an exception, for the purpose of this procedure—which, as Freud in one of his latest papers has said, as an analysis “can only be short and incomplete”—is accomplished “if Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXVI, 2007