The Analyst's Path to Development: Remembering Important Influences

Abstract

Retiring from the NHS and continuing with private practice relieves a pressure on time that allows for a broader pattern of daily pursuits as well as time for deeper reflection. I chanced to revisit the psychiatric hospital where I had worked early on in my career and from where I had embarked on specialist NHS training in psychotherapy and training in psychoanalysis. This visit led to another revisiting over time and in my mind, in which memories of the past arose in sharp profile, surprising me about aspects of events that I had forgotten. The unconscious links and associations are of interest to me considering that the memories involve current-day places near to where I have lived and practised for many years since leaving the psychiatric hospital but I had not given conscious thought to their significance related to the past. The course of the remembering indirectly provides a modern history of the end of the asylum era in psychiatry.