Older Analysts Aging Well with Judy Kantrowitz, PhD

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“Everyone was all for inclusion. There wasn't anybody who felt that this movement for inclusion was anything but good. But there were a lot of worries that in our focus on inclusion that we’ve turned away from thinking about the teaching of analysis per se - of what goes on with the analyst and the patient, teaching how we work with people, how we think about people. Countertransference can get lost in this way. Even though there is a focus on the countertransference in terms of discrimination, but that is just one factor. So, there was a lot of concern that we could lose interest in development and interest in intrapsychic life."

Episode Description: We begin by referring to Judy's first podcast (#83) where she reported on her interviews with former analysands about the nature of their termination experience. She has continued to rely on personal conversations to learn about the inner life of individuals in her current project of interviewing analysts over age 70 about their life in psychoanalysis. We discuss their generativity, their resilience, their personal difficulties, and their vision for the future of our field. Common to many respondents is their greater comfort in using themselves in their clinical encounters. We discuss the challenge of understanding long-term patients who maintain ongoing contact with their analysts seemingly without plans for termination. We conclude with Judy sharing with us her personal experiences of termination, loss, and her own resiliency and passion for her work.

Our Guest: Judy L. Kantrowitz, Ph.D. is a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and formerly a Clinical Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, now a corresponding member. She is the author of four books, The Patient's Impact on the Analyst (1996); Writing about Patients: responsibilities, risks, and ramifications (2006), Myths of Termination: What Patients Can Teach Analyst About Endings (2014), and The Role of Patient -Analyst Match in the Process and Outcome of Psychoanalysis (2020). She has served three times on the Editorial of JAPA and won the JAPA paper prize for 2020. She is currently on the board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. She is in private practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Brookline, MA.

Recommended Readings:

Erikson, Erik H: The Life Cycle Completed. New York & London W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.

Junkers, Gabriele, editor and author: The Empty Couch. London & New York. Routledge, 2013.

Valliant, George E.: Aging Well:: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development, New York, Boston, London, Little Brown. 2002.

Valliant, George E. Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study.Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England. The Belknap Press of Harvard university.2012.