This webinar, based on Steven Kuchuck’s new edited book Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional (Routledge, 2014), will address the phenomena of the psychotherapist/psychoanalyst’s personal life and psychology. By expanding psychoanalytic study beyond theory and technique to include a more careful examination of the clinician’s childhood and adult life events, participants will have an opportunity to focus on ways in which these experiences and crises affect the tenor of the therapist’s presence in the consulting room, and how these occurrences affect clinical choices. We will explore the relationship between self-disclosure and tracking the impact of the therapist’s subjectivity, with a focus on areas of overlap and differentiation between the two and the relationship of each to theoretical choices and technique. Participants will examine related issues of unavailable therapeutic data and difficulties in understanding how patients experience us that arise when the analyst’s subjectivity becomes bracketed or even dissociated, and raise questions about therapist temperament, conflicts around being seen, and struggles with self-care.

Although contemporary psychoanalysis teaches that it is only by acknowledging life experience and psychological makeup that analysts can be most effective in helping their patients, few articles and fewer books have been entirely devoted to this topic. We will discuss some of the reasons for and consequences of this sparse literature.