Psychoanalysis: A Human, All Too Human Profession

Abstract

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster.”(Nietzsche, 1886/1997, p. 52)

The crisis Nietzsche (1887/1996) considers “Human, All Too Human” to be a monument of is liberating himself from all the things which in his nature does not belong to him. Seemingly, this is another manifestation of his imperative in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1883/2006): “Become what thou art!” (p. 192).

From the advent of psychoanalysis, we have been confronted with several principles and concepts; neutrality, being good-enough, holding, containment, no memory, no desire, etc. to which a psychoanalyst is always expected to be highly attentive. Let’s take a brief look at the definition of some of these concepts and other requirements for becoming a psychoanalyst:

- A good enough mother (analyst): She responds to the needs of her child in a way that they would be able to form the illusion that they themselves have created the object (Jacobs, 2008).

- Holding the child (patient): Minimizing the environmental impingements for the child (patient) (Jacobs, 2008). The environment should be attuned to the needs of the child (patient). Some of the characteristics of a holding environment which Winnicott (1975, pp. 285-286) stated he had borrowed from Freud are as follows: The method of the analyst is objective observation; The analyst doesn’t enter their moral judgments in the therapeutic relationship and has no wish to intrude with the details of their personal life and ideas; There is a clear line between reality and phantasy in analysis (Abram, 2007).

- No memory and no desire on the part of the analyst: The analysts should not remember previous sessions and should try to achieve a state of the mind so that at every session they feel they have never met the patient before and should avoid having any desire for the cure, understanding or the result of the analysis. Each analytic session should have no past and no future (Bion, 1967).