title: Becoming related: the education of a psychoanalyst.
abstract: The author uses a "professional memoir," a story about his first experiences in clinical work, to illustrate what he believes to be certain fundamental aspects of an analytic attitude. Taking place in a psychiatric hospital, it is meant to highlight the central place of intuition, emotional receptivity, empathy, relatedness-and their inherent dangers-in engaging therapeutically with patients' emotional disturbances. The author postulates that these and related aspects of clinical psychoanalysis are not sufficiently emphasized in psychoanalytic training and are often eclipsed by idealizations of psychoanalytic theories and their derivative techniques, third-party demands for evidence-based data, preoccupations with neurobiological correlates of experience, etc. Despite the clinical fact that psychoanalysis can be extraordinarily helpful to patients, he questions whether clinical psychoanalysis is rightly regarded as a "treatment."
authors.affiliation: Training and Supervising Analyst at San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.
authors.forename: Stephen D
authors.initials: SD
authors.lastname: Purcell
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011568:Psychiatric Nursing / Q000379:methods*; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy / Q000193:education*
keywords: Psychoanalytic training; analytic attitude; analytic technique; emotional engagement; group dynamics; intuition; seriously disturbed patients; therapeutic relationship; transference