Welcome to PEP Web! Viewing the full text of this document requires a subscription to PEP Web. If you are coming in from a university from a registered IP address or secure referral page you should not need to log in. Contact your university librarian in the event of problems. If you have a personal subscription on your own account or through a Society or Institute please put your username and password in the box below. Any difficulties should be reported to your group administrator. Username: Password: Can't remember your username and/or password? If you have forgotten your username and/or password please click here and log in to the PaDS database. Once there you need to fill in your email address (this must be the email address that PEP has on record for you) and click "Send." Your username and password will be sent to this email address within a few minutes. If this does not work for you please contact your group organizer. Athens user? Login here. Not already a subscriber? Order a subscription today.

(2007). Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 15:316-318

Who should become a Psychoanalyst?

Angela Sheppard

“Cowardice is easily rationalized as prudence, but it is hard to pretend to courage.”

Patrick Mahony

There is great courage required in the daily encounter of analysis. There is violence intrinsic to the process. Danielle Quinodoz (2006) writes about “Being a Psychoanalyst: An Everyday Audacity.” Winnicott describes the “non-angry destruction of the object” (1971, p. 110) inherent in the rare capacity to make use of another person. Jacques Mauger and Lise Monette write about our unconscious hatred of transference, the experience of the profound difference of the other, and more specifically about “the unconscious hatred of the transference” (2000).

Marion Milner (1950) describes her discovery that violence is part of creativity, an essential aspect of the analytic process.

One of the functions of painting [all creativity] [is] surely the restoring and recreating externally what one had loved and internally hurt or destroyed… The human predicament that results from the inescapable discrepancy between self and other… results in primitive hating. (pp. 67-68)

To transcend this hatred, Milner proposes “the revolutionary idea that creativeness is something which comes from the free reciprocal interplay of differences that are confronting each other with equal rights to be different, equal rights to their own identity.” At the same time,

how difficult it is for our human nature to allow for such an interplay, what titanic emotional forces can be working against it… in order to “realize” other people, to make them and their uniqueness fully real to oneself, one has to be able to break down the barrier of space between self and other, yet at the same time to be able to maintain it, this seems to be the paradox of creativity. (pp. 143-144)

These titanic emotional forces are the primitive wishes and fears of devouring or being devoured by the mother, of total control or total surrender in our longing to be one with the mother. Destruction precludes discovery. The give and take of mutuality is the creativity of successful mothers, and successful analyses. Discovery transcends destructiveness. Piera Aulagnier writes about the primary, necessary, natural violence of the mother's verbalizing her child—talking for him before he can do it for himself—which represents the pre-I of the infant and that will determine

- 316 -

[This is a summary or excerpt from the full text of the book or article. The full text of the document is available to subscribers.]