Ideas of Influence: the Impact of the Analyst’s Character on the Analysis

Abstract

The fact that analysts inevitably analyze “in character” (i.e., as themselves) has been commonly assumed but unacknowledged publicly ever since Freud’s Papers on Technique (1911–1915). Analysts’ implicit private beliefs about the impact of their own characters on analytic work have been addressed obliquely via theorizing about the analyst’s subjectivity and the role of mutually created resistances and enactments in the transference/countertransference matrix, but these views remain largely tacit. The author suggests that the psychoanalytic concept of character has run aground as a moral issue, not a theoretical one, and that its deeper role as the vehicle for unconscious action remains indispensable in analytic work. An extended clinical example is presented to illustrate the author’s preliminary ideas about the impact of her own character in this analysis.