On claiming a psychoanalytic identity

In this paper I describe how I have struggled to find a viable identity for myself as a “psychoanalytic psychotherapist”. Such clinical entities have been constructed by employing a particular logic, that of using parameters, which sets up an ideal of psychoanalytic practice from which all other forms of practice are meant to deviate. I argue, by means of a clinical example, that this way of thinking distorts our understanding of the analytic process. At an institutional level it deflects from the need to map out how we actually practice (rather than how we ought to practice), which we need to know so we can address real differences in approaches and levels of knowledge and skill