Analyst Vulnerability and Analytic Vitality
Chair: Carolyn Steinberg
Presenters: Carolyn Steinberg, Paul Steinberg, Darren Thompson, Elizabeth Wallace
Art Credits: Carolyn Steinberg | Appears | 2023 | oil and cold wax
Vulnerability is one of the most familiar and critical aspects of our clinical work. Analysts know that for a genuine sense of vitality to develop, a healthy functioning analytic process necessitates a tolerable degree of vulnerability. Historically, closer attention has been lent to our patients’ vulnerability. We rarely hear and read about analysts’ vulnerability, and almost never that of the analytic couple. This might be understandable considering common synonyms (impotence, helplessness, defenselessness, weakness) that readily connote a devalued state to be avoided. Indeed, the Latin root, “vulnus”, translates as “wound”. Analysts are supposed to help their patients and not to impair them, or be themselves impaired.
Without closer examination, the analyst might implicitly dismiss the vulnerability they experience as simply a hazard of the job, as though nothing could be gained by careful exploration of this regular clinical occurrence. The risk of dismissing our vulnerability, however, may be to miss a key direction expanding understanding and aliveness. The few authors writing on this subject have highlighted the value of the analyst’s contribution of vulnerability as it arises within the analytic work, for example, the analyst’s own narcissism. While this is an important aspect for each analyst to consider closely and analyze, the focus might remain too narrow if viewed only as belonging to either the patient or the analyst. It may not penetrate to the most authentic aspects of vitality that we share with our patients.
To suggest that vulnerability is communicated unconsciously between members of the analytic couple, possessing physical traces (the allusion to wound) is to place the patient’s historical past in the most vibrant here-and-now analytic movement. Patient and analyst seem unconsciously to “co-own” vulnerable experience within “the body of the work”. Carried within a structure, a body, it then refers doubly to both subject and object, past and present. Being indispensable to the patient-analyst dyad, it is an infantile attribute through which “each calls for the other”, forming possibilities that neither alone could have otherwise have had or predicted.
We propose to describe perspectives of four psychoanalysts who worked to be open to their own emergent vulnerability in novel ways, in different clinical circumstances. Each will discuss clinical vignettes describing how their vulnerability with a patient was revealed to them, how it was experienced and worked with, and how it led to unexpected discoveries and developments.
Dr Carolyn Steinberg MS, MD, FRCPC, FIPA, is a psychoanalyst and Fellow of the International Psychoanalytic Association. She is a member of The Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in Seattle (NPSI). She is a Board member of NPSI. She is the Secretary of the North American Psychoanalytic Confederation. Carolyn is a psychiatrist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry Faculty of Medicine at UBC. She practises in a private office in Vancouver BC where she sees infants, children and adults in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
Paul Steinberg, MD, FRCPC, FIPA, is a training and supervising analyst at the Western Canada Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry of the University of British Columbia, where he is clinical coordinator of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy supervision and maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. He was awarded the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society’s 2016 Douglas Levin essay prize. He is the author of Psychoanalysis in Medicine: Applying Psychoanalytic Thought to Contemporary Medical Care and Psychoanalysis in Mental Health: Applying Psychoanalytic Thought to Contemporary Mental Health Practice.
Dr Darren Thompson, MD, FRCPC, FIPA, FABP is a psychoanalyst and a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (SPSI), and he is Past-President of the Western Canada Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. Darren is also a psychiatrist and Assistant Professor in the UBC Department of Psychiatry. He has a private office in Vancouver BC where he treats adults in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
Dr. Elizabeth Wallace, MD, FRCPC, FIPA, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Calgary, and Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Calgary where she teaches and supervises residents. She is a training and supervising analyst with the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis and on faculty at the Western Canada Psychoanalytic Institute. She is current President of WCPSI.
Learning Objectives: After this presentation, participants can expect to…
- Identify at least different manifestations of vulnerability in the clinician.
- Describe how vulnerability can be understood from several theoretical perspectives.
- Value vulnerability in the clinician as a potential tool for better understanding and guiding treatment interventions related to unconscious communication within the patient/clinician dyad.
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