Psychoanalytic Reflections: Training and Practice (Paperback or Softback)

My friend Peter Shabad quotes Soren Kierkegard, who said that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. In thinking about the papers that make up this volume, I see themes that took a good deal of time to coalesce in my own mind. For example, I wrote papers on the analyst’s hope, courage, and integrity long before they emerged in my mind as “clinical values,” and formed the nucleus of my first book.

     How do we each create a personally resonant way of thinking about treatment? I believe that most people who have had only graduate school training have not yet developed what I would call their signature style. They may have many styles, or techniques they have learned. But, often, they do not have a clinical identity, a core of strongly held beliefs about what is important to them in the work they do. Post graduate training is a place to develop those beliefs. To me, most of the work in any identity building task is accomplished through contrasts. By seeing what goes on in his friend’s home, the ten year old child understands that his parents’ way of functioning is not the only possibility. Similarly, in training, by hearing how differently various teachers and supervisors think about treatment, we can examine, validate, and modify our core beliefs about the work, and eventually forge that signature style. This style does not tell us what to say in any session. Nothing can, fortunately, I would say. Treatment always has to remain a live response to real moments with another person. It can never be reduced to formulas, recipes, manuals, pre-programmed sound bites.

     We each search, our whole careers, for what really helps anyone have a richer life. For me, the poet, Rilke best captured what makes our work so hard, and so worthwhile. In his Letters to a Young Poet (pp. 23–24) Rilke says, “...at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.”

Psychoanalytic Reflections: Training and Practice is a book and collection of papers our field has long needed and awaited. Sandra Buechler is a most engaging companion, mentor and guide in this beautifully written and profoundly honest journey toward a psychoanalytic way of working, thinking and living. In passionate, yet clear and graceful language, she leads us through the pleasures and perils of the crafting and development of a genuine and rich psychoanalytic identity. With deep sensitivity to inner and outer struggle, we come to trust her highly original and personal reflections on becoming and being a psychoanalyst. With an unusual ease and grace, she weaves together the personal with the theoretical, the clinical with a profound love of literature, research on emotions with the evolution of a professional identity. In my opinion, there is no better introduction to the field for a young clinician nor a better refresher for an experienced one. The wide-ranging personal, ethical, clinical, and theoretical dimensions of Dr. Buechler’s writing stem from the very origins of our field and point to its future. This collection of papers ranging over almost 30 years of experience is highly recommended reading for us all.

Paul Lipmman

This book is a treasure.  Not only does Sandra Buechler teach us about training and supervision; she shows us, clearly and directly, what psychoanalysis is, as a vocation and as a way of life that matters, to those who teach it, to those who learn it, to those who seek it.  This book is a gift for candidates-in-training and to their mentors, as well as to patients who wonder why people do this work. We learn that this work responds to a vocation, a passion.

Donna Orange:

Sandra Buechler is always refreshing, lively and completely genuine in her views. Psychoanalysis constantly needs such a fierce critic and at the same time, a fierce advocate.
Elizabeth Hegeman Ph.D