Int J Psychoanal (2017) 98:1275–1289 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.

12632

Self-analysis and the development of an interpretation

Donald Campbell
2 Provost Road, London NW3 4ST, UK – dlcampbell4@gmail.com

(Accepted for publication 28 November 2016)

In spite of the fact that Freud’s self-analysis was at the centre of so many of
his discoveries, self-analysis remains a complex, controversial and elusive
exercise. While self-analysis is often seen as emerging at the end of an analy-
sis and then used as a criteria in assessing the suitability for termination, I
try to attend to the patient’s resistance to self-analysis throughout an analy-
sis. I take the view that the development of the patient’s capacity for self-ana-
lysis within the analytic session contributes to the patient’s growth and their
creative and independent thinking during the analysis, which prepares him or
her for a fuller life after the formal analysis ends. The model I will present is
based on an over lapping of the patient’s and the analyst’s self-analysis, with
recognition and use of the analyst’s counter-transference. My focus is on the
analyst’s self-analysis that is in response to a particular crisis of not knowing,
which results in feeling intellectually and emotionally stuck. This paper is not
a case study, but a brief look at the process I went through to arrive at a par-
ticular interpretation with a particular patient during a particular session. I
will concentrate on resistances in which both patient and analyst initially rely
upon what is consciously known.

Keywords: counter-transference, impasse, interpretation, role responsiveness,

self-analysis, transference, and unconscious

A session
Mr Sideki is late again. He had cancelled the last two weeks of sessions.
Something vague about having to be out of town for work. This was to be
his first session back. Actually, it is rare for him to be on time. In fact I
can’t think of the last time he was on time. But he has made external
changes in his life. For the first time since I started working with him 2
years ago he is in regular employment and with good prospects. Also, for
the first time since his divorce he is dating only one girl and she has moved
into his flat. I remind myself that he feels that he no longer hates himself or
suffers from low self-esteem. Am I trying to console myself? I think about
how angry I am at him. Then I think about Mr Sideki’s addiction to
pornography and chat rooms to which he compulsively masturbates into
the wee hours of the morning. I feel totally frustrated in my efforts to inter-
pret effectively his resistance to analysis. He tells me that he cannot remem-
ber the previous session, and forgets the current session as soon as he walks
out. Sometimes I react to his triumph over me by becoming overactive, and
then feel I’ve been provoked into an intrusive enactment as the Dominatrix1
1
Mr Sideki used this term that commonly refers to a dominating woman who takes a sadistic role in
sadomasochistic sexual activities.

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1276 D. Campbell

in the virtual world of his Internet chat room. The analysis has felt stuck
for months and I have run out of ideas.
While I am sitting in my analytic chair waiting for him, out of the blue I
begin thinking about D-day. Americans landing on Omaha Beach. Bullets
hitting soldiers under the water like in the film Saving Private Ryan (1998).
Barely making it to the beach. The invasion nearly failed. Almost thrown
back into the sea. Tom Hanks dragging a comrade by the hand up onto the
beach. As the camera pulls back we see it is just a hand, head and torso
without legs. I still get a visceral response whenever I visualize that scene.
The violence! I associated to the violence my patient was doing to his ses-
sions with his cancellations and coming late. Do I feel that he is castrating
me as an analyst by rendering me ineffective and paralyzed? I wondered if I
wanted to retaliate by castrating him.
I then thought of a scene from the TV series Band of Brothers (2001),
during the fighting in Normandy. American soldiers have captured three or
four German soldiers and are chatting with them. One of the German sol-
diers speaks fluent English. He is from Seattle. The GIs can’t understand
why he joined the German Army. The man explained that his parents had
come from Germany. A GI offers the Germans cigarettes. While the Ger-
mans are smoking the cigarettes the Americans suddenly shoot them in the
back of the head. I was jolted by that image when I first saw it, and
recoiled when I thought about it again. My association was to having my
mind shot by my patient. Then I realized that I was defending against
something I didn’t want to think about, namely more immediate and fright-
ening consequences of my anger at him. I wondered if my patient was terri-
fied that I would betray him; that in my angry state of mind I would lull
him into a false sense of my good intentions and then damage his mind
with an interpretation when he let his guard down. These daydreams proba-
bly took about 20 seconds.
After Mr Sideki, in his mid-50s, short, pudgy and balding, lay on the
couch he said, ‘Did you get my letter? And cheque?’ I didn’t reply. ‘I was
able to arrange work so that I’ll be in London on Monday, Wednesday and
Friday. I’m pleased that I’ve been able to do that. I didn’t like missing the
last 2 weeks. I also told the boss what I’m doing when I leave work early.
He’s said he hoped I’d tell him someday. And, you know what? I thought,
why keep it a mystery? So I told him, and he was OK about it.’
I was aware that he hadn’t arranged to be available to come to his fourth
weekly session, or told me what he actually said to his boss. This was
against the background that Mr Sideki was keeping a distance from me,
which I thought was because he was anxious about my retaliation for his
cancelling sessions. There is a history to this. He often started sessions after
his cancellations this way. At this point I was not thinking of my day-
dreams, but of his break, his lateness, and my annoyance. I thought his ref-
erence to his letter and cheque was a guilt offering to avoid talking about
his resistance to coming to his sessions, or like not telling me what he told
his boss. This all felt like it came from a false self and I held back.
I thought of Mr Sideki as an emotionally deprived, narcissistically disso-
ciated man whose false self enabled him to function in business and in serial
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sexual affairs. My experience of his false self in sessions contributed to my

caution at the beginning of the session. I was also wary of being drawn into
a transference enactment of a Dominatrix/mother, which was usually part
of his night time chat room ritual. We had learned that the function of this
repetitive behaviour was to appear to be dominated by the woman while
secretly controlling her by getting her to humiliate him. These themes were
echoed in his compulsive use of sadomasochistic pornography, and in his
transference to me as a cruel mother or weak dominated father.
Mr Sideki continued, ‘Feeling better. Able to talk to people more. Able
to think about what’s normal. Am I normal? Other people have problems.
That’s normal.’
My heart sinks. I feel that he’s losing himself in a crowd.
Mr Sideki broke the ensuing silence to say, ‘Last night I masturbated for
4 hours. Didn’t get to bed until 4 a.m. The night before, too. I’m tired.
Realise it affects my work, my career.’ He then goes on at some length that
other people also have problems.
I think it is time to take up his staying away from me. When he pauses I
say, ‘I think you are anxious about thinking about your problems with me
after cancelling the last two weeks. Anxious about what I’ll think. Will I be
angry with you? Can you trust me? So, you are staying away from me and
telling me about other people’s problems.’
‘You know, I never had a community of friends, never had anyone to
talk to. Now I have friends I can talk to.’
During the long silence that followed I reflected to myself that I had been
here before with him, and there was something stale about my comment. I
briefly recalled the violence in my daydreams, and then returned to what he
had just said. I wondered if Mr Sideki brushed me aside because my com-
ment had been flat, without intensity. That’s why he told me about the
friends he could talk to. However, this didn’t ring true. He had never men-
tioned having a close friend. At first I thought that I might have made him
anxious by referring to feelings that he might have about me. Then I
thought again and wondered if my comment came across as a routine
effort, a familiar thought based on what I was thinking rather than what
was on his mind.
So I said, ‘You are not sure I will be someone you can talk to about
something you are worried about, namely masturbating until 4 in the morn-
ing. Three weeks ago you told me you masturbated until 8 a.m. and were
an hour late for work. I think you are worried about being out of control,
sabotaging your career.’

The patient’s self-analysis

The following silence feels thoughtful. Mr Sideki replied, ‘I know what the
trigger was. I was angry about all the work I had to do on 4 years of tax
returns.’ Then he stopped talking. Mr Sideki had interrupted a moment of
self-reflection.
I decided to bring Mr Sideki back to the moment when he stopped talk-
ing because I assumed that he had had a thought that made him anxious,

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1278 D. Campbell

and that was why he stopped talking. So I said, ‘I notice that you stopped
after telling me how tired you were from working on your taxes. Perhaps
you find working here taxing.’ I kicked myself as soon as I uttered the last
sentence. It was an obvious interpretation that he might even have expected.
I thought I had spoiled an opportunity to return to his self-analysis. Fortu-
nately, Mr Sideki ignored my last remark, and let me know that he could
get away from me to his familiar source of comfort and reassurance – mas-
turbation. He said, ‘When I got tired I went into a chat room and found a
Dominatrix.’ Drawing Mr Sideki’s attention to his stopping when he was
angry facilitated a moment in which he made a connection between his
anger and going to the Dominatrix. I felt that he had, perhaps uncon-
sciously, brought us back to something more real. This was the first
moment of emotional vulnerability in the session.
I said, ‘Masturbation gets rid of tiredness and anxiety.’
‘Yeah. The feelings are unbearable.’ This is said with feeling, and fol-
lowed by a painful silence.
I thought again about his tiredness as a consequence of his exhaustion at
keeping his anger at bay in order to work on his tax returns.
I said, ‘And these feelings can’t be thought about, like your rage about
being forced to work on your taxes by the Government, or to submit to the
Dominatrix/me to understand your unbearable feelings.’
‘Yes, but the trouble is it is more than one feeling. For instance, my
boss’s boss is putting us under a lot of pressure to finish a project. I’m
under a lot of stress. And I hate it when he’s critical without recognising all
the good work I’ve done. I hate feeling unappreciated.’
During the silence I feel tempted to follow-up on this in the transference,
but I feel uneasy. It is all too conscious. I wonder if he wonders whom the
boss represents and this leads me back to the Dominatrix. I remember that
when we thought about his experience of the Dominatrix before, we arrived
at an understanding that she represents his controlling, castrating mother.
He gravitates to the Dominatrix in the chat room because he knows that
she would appear to be in control of him. But he also knows how to get her
to order him around. That was his secret. She thought she was in control,
but secretly he knows that he is dominating her. These exchanges with a
Dominatrix are accompanied by masturbation, which demonstrates the sex-
ual gratification he derives from his triumph over the dominating woman.
What struck me at this point was that he did not refer to this understanding
that I thought we had arrived at earlier. He related to me as though we had
never shared this view of his relationship with the Dominatrix. I assumed
that he did not want this understanding to spoil his presentation of himself
as a victim and his secret triumph over my earlier interpretative work. (In
retrospect, I think my reference to the Dominatrix mother was too alive in
the transference and he defended against his anxiety about my dominating
him with an interpretation by showing me that he would not be controlled
by my interpretation. He had eliminated it from his mind.)
Before I could say something about this he said, ‘I’ve been thinking
about a guy who started with me at the previous insurance company and
was promoted ahead of me. He is now a big wheel in the company. We
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 Self-analysis and the development of an interpretation 1279

never got on, never had any chemistry. He’s the one who got me sacked 5
years ago. I talked about this recently with a mutual friend and decided to
try to patch things up over dinner. We had dinner last week and I had the
same reaction as I had 5 years ago. I still felt unappreciated, belittled and
furious. After the dinner I masturbated all night. It even affected my golf
game the next day. I masturbated again the next night and finally got rid of
the feeling so I could go to sleep.’
At this point I am getting drowsy, and I hear Mr Sideki say,
‘Why are you silent?’

The analyst’s self-analysis in the session

I immediately became alert and noticed that I had become drowsy as he
was telling me yet again about his masturbation. It had a deadening effect
on me. It killed my capacity to think. This brought me back to my day-
dreams with their more violent images. I reflected that I could think
about killing Mr Sideki before he arrived in the room, but once he lay on
the couch I broke off those associations. I then remembered my associa-
tion to his rejection of my interpretation of his triumph over what he
experiences as my dominating him with my interpretation about his rela-
tionship with the Dominatrix, and his anger about being compelled to
work by someone who didn’t appreciate what he was doing. Did he return
to this when he associated to the colleague who got him sacked because
he was afraid I was going to stop his analysis? Did he feel that we lacked
chemistry? Had I missed a deeper more fundamental point? Had he agreed
with me at the time because I was right, but also because it felt safe to
do so? Was he unconsciously plea-bargaining with me, that is, agreeing to
a lesser crime to avoid being charged with a more serious offence, and a
more serious punishment, like an executioner’s bullet in the head? Then I
realized that I had avoided his state of mind and focused on his mastur-
batory solution to it.
I said, ‘I think I’ve moved away from you as a reaction to your move
away from me to masturbation; your way of getting rid of feeling unappre-
ciated, belittled and cut down by me. Before, when we had talked about
your feeling belittled followed by engagement with the Dominatrix, I think
somewhere you felt I didn’t really appreciate the state you were in. I think
you are frightened of me, that I will shame you, confuse you, and damage
your mind.’
The atmosphere became very still and Mr Sideki cried silently until the
end of the session.

Freud’s self-analysis
Freud’s psychoanalytic evidence came from three sources: the clinical data
from his patients, the data from his self-analysis, and cultural data from
anthropological and literary sources. Consequently, Freud needed to verify
within himself the unconscious processes he observed in his patients
(Anzieu, 1986). Self-analysis needs to exist in a dialogue with another. For
Freud, his self-analysis was stimulated by: (1) his dialogue with his patients,

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1280 D. Campbell

(2) the transference, particularly his awareness of his patients’ desire for
him, and (3) his counter-transference towards his patients.
Grubrich-Simitis (1997) identifies the origin of what later was referred to
as Freud’s self-analysis and counter-transference in his intimate and patient
listening to Anna O in Studies on Hysteria (1895 [1893–95]). She eloquently
described the process that Freud (and Breuer) were engaged in as “admit-
ting her inside oneself, allowing her to come into contact with one’s inmost
being . . . exposing one’s own unconscious to the onslaught of that of the
other . . . ” (p. 30).
Freud’s self-analysis reveals what a painful and disturbing process it was
because self-analysis, like a dream, is provoked by a crisis. Anzieu (1986)
and Quinodoz (2005) identify the death of his father Jakob in October 1896
as the precipitant of Freud’s systematic self-analysis, especially the analysis
of his own dreams, which is so evident in Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
During the period from 1895 to 1902, when Freud made the fundamental
discoveries upon which he based psychoanalysis, he also suffered physical
illnesses, and the sense that he had failed to satisfactorily complete a single
psychoanalytic treatment. In the summer of 1897 leading up to the anniver-
sary of his father’s death, Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess describing his state
of mind in this way: “Fathomless and bottomless laziness, intellectual stag-
nation, summer dreariness, vegetative well-being that is the reason for my
neither having replied to your very interesting letter nor having written a
new one” (Masson, 1985, p. 252). It got worse. Two days later on 22 June
1897, Freud wrote to Fliess, “I have never before even imagined anything
like this period of intellectual paralysis. Every line is torture” (Masson,
1985, p. 253). As Anzieu (1986) points out, “All the major discoveries which
Freud makes in the course of his self-analysis, which were to constitute the
basic corpus of psychoanalytic notions, were similarly preceded by a period
of paralysis” (p. 232). Freud wrote to Fliess: “My self-analysis is in fact the
most essential thing I have at present and promises to become of the great-
est value to me if it reaches its end. . . . I have found, in my own case too
[the] phenomenon of being in love with my mother and jealous of my
father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood Freud”
(Masson, 1985, pp. 270–2). It is not unusual for an analyst to go through a
milder intellectual paralysis before arriving at an interpretation as I did at
the end of the session that I reported.
Throughout his life Freud relied upon his self-analysis to find his way
through emotional pain, intellectual challenges, professional and personal
crises. Grubrich-Simitis (1997) suggests that the idiosyncratic structure of
one of his last papers, Moses and Monotheism (1939 [1934–38]), its assertion
of Freud’s Jewish roots, and, unusually, the preservation of the drafts of
previous manuscripts for others to see the process of his self-reflections is
evidence of Freud’s delving into his self-analysis during the final years of
his career (Grubrich-Simitis, 1997, pp. 88–9).
Around Christmas 1937, at the end of his life, Freud chose as the last
paper he would write in Vienna Splitting of the Ego in the Process of
Defence (1940 [1938]). Although Freud himself wondered if this paper was a
repetition of ‘something long familiar and obvious’, he was inclined to think
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 Self-analysis and the development of an interpretation 1281

it was about ‘something entirely new and puzzling’, but he never told us
what that ‘something’ was (Campbell, 2005). Although I do not know what
that something was, I wonder if what was familiar was the ego’s use of
splitting in normal development, and what was new was Freud’s use of
splitting and disavowal to enable him to continue his thinking and self-
analysis in spite of the physical pain from the cancer in his jaw and the
awareness that his life and the lives of his family were threatened by the
Nazi (p. 285).

Contemporary contributions to self-analysis

An analytic technique that focuses on developing the patient’s capacity for
self-reflection is primarily influenced by Freud’s self-analysis, owes much to
Strachey’s emphasis on the transference (Strachey, 1934), what is happening
in the here and now (Sandler, 1969) of a session, Paula Heimann’s (1950)
positive view of the counter-transference and her valuation of the analyst’s
unconscious perception of the patient’s unconscious, and Bion’s (1970)
attention to process, uncertainty and knowing. More recently Brenman Pick
(1985), Carpy (1989) and Jacobs (1996) emphasized the valuable resource
that is available to the analyst who attends to the impact that the patient
makes on the analyst’s internal world. My paper takes for granted a distinc-
tion that Busch (2009) and Bell (2011) have identified and explored between
what is known and coming to know; that is the difference between knowl-
edge as a state of knowing, and the process of acquiring self-knowledge.
The kind of self-analysis that I have been referring to in this paper is not
an absent-minded, easy going, free associative process. My focus is on the
disturbed origin of self-analysis, that is a particular type of crisis that is on
the extreme end of the crisis spectrum, namely a stuckness like the experi-
ence of not knowing that Freud referred to as “this period of intellectual
stagnation” (Masson, 1985, p. 253). Analysts will be familiar with this expe-
rience. It is our bread and butter. We can’t escape it, even when we make
an interpretation.
When the analyst’s self-analysis is triggered by a period of mental paraly-
sis, as in the session I refer to, I have found that it is important to recognize
the stuckness and bear it, and not to grab at familiar interpretations. I try
to see through what I think I should see, as Michael Podro (Clark, 2015)
said of the artist’s perception. In this case, I had to take a second look at
my resistance to the unconscious dimension in the two daydreams. I am not
suggesting that all self-analysis requires this kind of crisis. However, I
believe that there needs to be at least an element of doubt about our current
understanding of the patient and the conscious status quo of the analysis.
The kind of doubt that I have in mind Bion (1970) refers to as “O”, the
current experience that cannot be known at one moment, but can be known
later. For instance, when an analyst is able to transform a beta element into
an alpha element. (For a summary of Bion’s contribution to process see
Flynn, 2016.)
There are other sources of doubt that can stimulate the analyst’s self-ana-
lysis. Sometimes doubt is the consequence of a sadomasochistic interaction

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1282 D. Campbell

between the analyst and the patient (Campbell, 2014). The analyst’s self-
analysis should enable him or her to step back from the fray to consider
what anxieties are being controlled by the sadomasochistic engagement. I
have found that Sandler’s (1976) concept of role responsiveness is useful in
orienting myself to an overlap between the patient’s pathology and my
pathology, as experienced in the counter-transference. This role responsive-
ness, which the patient has usually unconsciously evoked or provoked
through the transference, is often enacted in the sadomasochistic exchanges.
At other times doubt is voiced by a patient who questions the effectiveness
of the analysis, and the ensuing crisis may manifest itself as an impasse.
Rosenfeld’s (1987) view of impasse has helped me with a kind of stuckness
that arises when a patient has a severe negative reaction that does not fol-
low real progress. In order to understand the impasse Rosenfeld recom-
mends that the analyst engage in a self-analysis that examines transference
collusions, for instance, occasions when the analyst might have hurt the
patient, as well as counter-transference problems.
Doubt does not only emerge from an intellectual crisis, but is a feature of
ongoing analytic work. Since we can never fathom the unconscious, every
interpretation is incomplete and the incompleteness represents what we
don’t know, which is exposed by the new knowing of the last interpretation.
Every interpretation will carry at least the hint of doubt.
This is why Bion could write, “when approaching the unconscious – that
is, what we do not know – we, patient and analyst alike, are certain to be
disturbed. In every consulting-room, there ought to be two rather frightened
people: the patient and the psychoanalyst. If they are not both frightened,
one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows”
(1973, p. 155).
The danger that analysis poses for the patient and the analyst, which
Bion (1966) refers to as “catastrophic change”, is the source of resistance to
using self-analysis to uncover unconscious meaning. A common defence is
the analyst’s and/or patient’s adoption of a pseudo self-analysis, which may
focus on what is already known, or it may have a competitive edge to see
who arrives at the deepest insight. When we are attentive to this kind of
self-analysis we can sense that it is performative, superficial and doesn’t ring
true. There are no real surprises, or shocks, no dry spells, or discarded
thoughts. It dwells on the conscious, or even self-conscious.
Glover (1931) identifies an expression of this type of resistance and its
consequences in the analyst’s inexact interpretation, which the patient seizes
upon as a “displacement-substitute” (p. 400) because it is sufficiently remote
from the unconscious source of anxiety. It may come as a familiar thought,
or an over-valued idea (Britton and Steiner, 1994), an idea that had proved
helpful in the past. These ideas may come to us during a process of con-
trolled or constructed free association, a kind of free association that is pri-
marily a conscious process and may yield temporary relief. It is not that the
old explanations are necessarily wrong; it is that they do not take into
account the unconscious ingredients of a particular moment. In order to
defend against understanding deeper and more fundamental levels of anxi-
ety the analyst and the patient often willingly accept this kind of
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 Self-analysis and the development of an interpretation 1283

interpretation. As Glover notes, this inexact interpretation functions as a

kind of psychic homeopathy (Glover, 1931, p. 411).

The analyst’s self-analysis before the session

For Freud an analysis was essentially the analysis of resistance in the
patient, but self-analysis, including his own, addressed the resistance in the
analyst as well. In this paper analysis of my resistance to self-analysis led to
the content of an interpretation, and a more authentic affective communica-
tion. I was moved by the truthfulness of what I had discovered and I think
this resonated with the patient. The development of the interpretation was
process led. In a similar exercise Jacobs (1996) and Bell (2011) use dialogue
with their patients to deepen their self-analysis. In contrast, my self-analysis
was an internal process, initiated by the patient’s enactment, his lateness,
but was only mobilized by arriving at a stuckness, a feeling of hitting rock
bottom. What Freud referred to as “intellectual stagnation”.
My self-analytic process, which started before Mr Sideki arrived for his
session and was triggered by my two daydreams, was in response to the
impact his chronic cancellations and lateness had on me. The violence of
the images triggered a visceral response and stirred up unconscious anxiety
about using the day dreams in the session. I defended against this anxiety
by forgetting the daydreams and instead focused more consciously on Mr
Sideki’s masturbation, preparation of his taxes, and our earlier work on the
Dominatrix.
My attention to Mr Sideki’s conscious anxieties and his defences was a
sign of my resistance to taking up my more unconscious, murderous phan-
tasies, and his fear of me. This is an example of the way unconscious forces,
in this incidence my murderous phantasies, disturbed me during a session
and generated resistance. I was not able to formulate an interpretation
about Mr Sideki’s fear that I would damage his mind until I worked
through my resistance. Unfortunately, most sessions do not move in a
straight line, however much we would like to present them as such in a
paper.

Sources of the patient’s self-analysis

There are at least three sources of the patient’s self-analysis: (1) identifica-
tion with the analyst’s self-analysis, (2) the patient’s reflection on his or her
history, and (3) the analyst’s technique.

Identification with the analyst’s self-analysis

The patient’s self-analysis often begins in identification with the analyst’s
self-analysis, particularly the analyst’s commitment to analysing himself.
There is an inevitable interaction between the analysts’ effort to find an
answer to the question of why the patient thinks, feels and behaves the way
he or she does, and the same question that the analyst addresses to him or
herself. The ‘why question’ is the analytic question, which is often upstaged
by the analyst’s description of the patient’s behaviour or mental state as in

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1284 D. Campbell

their treatment of the analyst. When analysts use the transference as a

resource to answer the why question, we often go through our counter-trans-
ference, in order to discover what the patient’s transference has provoked in
us that we need to counter.
The transference and counter-transference, as representations of the
unconscious, provoke resistance in the analyst. Therefore, we can hardly
avoid our self-analysis if we are to discover the unconscious dimension of
our transference to the patient. For instance, my two daydreams can be
thought of as expressions of my counter-transference anger in response to
the patient’s anxiety about being a patient and his rejection of my analytic
efforts, as well as a diagnostic indicator of what was going on in the
analysis.
For Ogden (1997) reverie (Bion, 1962) that includes mundane, unobtru-
sive thoughts, feelings, fantasies, ruminations, daydreams, and bodily sensa-
tions that seem unconnected from what the patient is saying and doing, is
central to the way he works as an analyst. My own analytic work confirms
Ogden’s emphasis on the importance of the analyst’s scrutiny of his own
reverie in order to understand the “unconscious intersubjective construc-
tion” being generated with the patient (Ogden, 1977, p. 719). However, ini-
tially the two daydreams of my reverie drew me more deeply into my own
unconscious than I wanted to go. I turned away from understanding why I
avoided the daydreams the way I did. Fortunately, something in the day-
dreams kept trying to break through. In recounting a session with Mr
Sideki in a clinical meeting with colleagues I made a slip and said ‘parent’
instead of ‘patient’, which exposed my transference to the patient. I know
the reader will appreciate why I won’t take my analysis of my resistance to
analysing my murderousness further in this paper. In any case, it was my
self-analysis that led me to see more clearly why I blocked out my violent
feelings toward the patient and, for most of the session, had not appreciated
how this contributed to his resistance.

Patient’s reflection on their past

Earlier Mr Sideki’s analysis enabled him to retrieve aspects of his past that
he had repressed. He grew up in Eastern Europe in a strict Roman Catholic
family that was dominated by his mother who he experienced as cold,
obsessional and controlling. She ran the family social life (based on the
church), finances, and decision-making. My patient described his father,
now dead, as remote, unavailable, neutered and marginalized by his castrat-
ing mother, and never offered an alternative to her. My patient’s abiding
memory of his father is sitting in an armchair behind a newspaper.
During latency, when his older brother, who he admired, progressed to
another school, Mr Sideki had a depressive breakdown, with an obsessive-
compulsive disorder, and chronic masturbation, which was ignored by his
family. By the time he was 12 he was obsessed with sexual thoughts about
his younger sister and women in church. He thought frequently of killing
his parents, and of himself dying in a car crash. He was haunted by the
Devil and knew that he would go to Hell. His dead relatives were looking

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 Self-analysis and the development of an interpretation 1285

down on him from Heaven. They could read his mind. He became very
obsessional. He had to turn a light switch on and off until he had a pure
thought. He erased ‘certain words’ until there was a hole in the paper. The
image of a black hole in his mind emerged later. His mother complained
about his obsessional behaviour, but made no attempt to understand it.
Meanwhile, he obsessionally masturbated four or five times a day. He
and I thought about how he was dominated by turbulent unacceptable ‘sin-
ful’ sexual thoughts that he tried to wipe out of his mind with obsessional
behaviour and sexual excitement through masturbating. ‘I would go to the
priest and confess to dirty thoughts about a girl and he told me, “Say so
many Hail Marys and if you are truly sorry God will forgive you.” But I’m
not really sorry for these thoughts, so I will never be forgiven. And I’m ter-
rified of dying and what happens when I die.’ As Mr Sideki recovered these
childhood and adolescent memories he said, ‘That’s why I’ve lived with this
low-grade depression all my life.’
Later Mr Sideki was able to make a clear link between the intrusive, all-
knowing and persecuting God and his controlling, shaming mother when he
recounted an incident that occurred when he was 15. His mother discovered a
sausage in the shower that my patient had used to masturbate with. She called
the family together in the living room and showed him the sausage and asked
what it was doing in the shower. Everyone knew the answer and my patient
felt utterly mortified. I thought that this memory illustrated the mother’s use
of humiliation to destroy Mr Sideki’s independent sexual identity. Steiner
(2011) makes the point that when pain, in this case shame, is inflicted with the
intention to punish and destroy it is more difficult to bear (p. 7). Shame serves
a protective function, a place to hide in order to restore defences and heal
wounded narcissism (Campbell, 2008). However, chronic shaming of Mr
Sideki by his mother as he was growing up, which he reported, undermined
his capacity to build up internal self-esteem and left him dependent upon
external objects. Mr Sideki said that his favourite fantasy was being admired
as he walked into a club with three beautiful naked women.
During the first year of his analysis, Mr Sideki reported a recurring and
terrifying image of a bottomless black hole in his mind. This hole opened
up when he went to bed at night. He tried to erase this experience by mas-
turbating. The black hole also appeared whenever a dangerous thought
occurred. My interpretations seemed to create this awful hole. Later, he
associated to his mother’s penetrating voice and thoughts that got inside
him like that black hole. Or, I thought, like being shot in the head. This
experience confirmed my view that Mr Sideki was terrified of being known
by me. My interpretations focused on his anxiety about being known, and
his defences against interpretations that he experienced as intrusive and
damaging his mind.

The analyst’s technique

The reader may remember a moment in the session when Mr Sideki had
become self-reflective and said that he thought that the trigger for his anger
was having to work on his tax returns. I brought him back to the moment

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1286 D. Campbell

of self-reflection that he had interrupted on the assumption that the inter-

ruption was triggered by an anxiety. However, I made the mistake of trying
to shift his thoughts from what he was thinking about before he stopped
talking to what I was thinking about. Noticing pauses, silences, slips and
change of direction as evidence of resistance triggered by an anxiety, even if
we do not know what they are about, can bring the patient back to an
uncomfortable affect or thought in order to explore it further. By taking
this approach we communicate to the patient that we value these acts of
resistance as sources of self-analytic work.
My first remark to Mr Sideki grew out of my conscious recall of similar
situations in the past. I was inviting Mr Sideki to talk about the predictable,
the familiar, and the already known. As it turned out, Mr Sideki turned
down my offer of a familiar interpretation. Nevertheless, he continued to
keep his distance, which was a familiar place for him. As the session pro-
gressed Mr Sideki and I reduced the distance between us as each of us toler-
ated increasing vulnerability.

Moving through a paralysis

Self-analysis needs a crisis in order for us to move from the familiar to the
vulnerable. Mr Sideki and I were in a crisis. He wasn’t able to come on
time or attend his sessions regularly. I couldn’t compete with his compulsive
masturbation and omnipotent phantasies that functioned in the bipersonal
field of the analysis like Baranger and Baranger’s (2008) “personal bastion”
to keep me away from Mr Sideki’s vulnerability, despair, and the black hole
of oblivion. I was not able to help my patient. This kind of crisis can strike
at the core of our identity as an analyst. We may doubt our training, ques-
tion the value and effectiveness of psychoanalysis, and lose confidence in
our ability to practice. I can’t say that I had reached that point with Mr
Sideki, but I had run out of ideas.
This sense of having failed to resolve a crisis may lead to what Freud
referred to as a mental paralysis. Sometimes we need to reach a state of
mental paralysis before we can be open to the new or unfamiliar, which is
likely to come as a surprise when the unconscious breaks through.
Reading papers and talking to colleagues helps me to think outside my
normal intellectual and emotional box, and not to dismiss thoughts before I
have given them a second chance.
Usually, after hours, days or months of failure a thought or image or
fantasy or forgotten memory comes from somewhere during a more sponta-
neous free associative time. The daydreams that I reported while waiting for
Mr Sideki at first did not seem related to my crisis, but they eventually shed
light on what I was resisting within me, which led to my interpretation of
his fear that I would damage his mind.

Conclusion
The ingredients of an interpretation, its position in time and space, and the
consequence of the intercommunication between the patient and analyst
make an interpretation a unique act. There has never been another like it,

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 Self-analysis and the development of an interpretation 1287

or will there ever be another like it. As patients resolve current conflicts,
they encounter new ones. A new interpretation will go through earlier inter-
pretations, and eventually the new interpretation will do violence to the old
one. In Mr Sideki’s case we worked our way to his fear that I would attack
his mind. I thought the source of this fear was a penetrating, shaming
super-ego representing his mother.
The reader will probably have noticed that my path to the interpretation
was not straightforward, but was, as Jonathan Lear described the analytic
process itself, improvisational and touched with the uncanny (Lear, 2014,
p. 691). Nevertheless, the process of arriving at the interpretation may be
more important for the patient and the analyst than the interpretation itself.
The esteemed Camden Town painter, Frank Auerbach’s description of
good painting captures something of the emergence of a good interpretation
that I am trying to identify: He puts it this way:

. . . all good painting looks as though the painting has escaped from the thicket of
prepared positions and has entered some sort of freedom where it exists on its own,
and by its own laws, and inexplicably has got free of all possible explanations. Pos-
sibly the explainers will catch up with it again, but never completely. . . . [It] stalks
into the world like a new monster.
(Clark, 2015)

Broadly speaking, the content of my day dreams, especially the D Day inva-
sion, can be thought of as a metaphor for my attempt to free my patient,
which threatens long-standing defences and incites an aggressive response.
The day dreams also convey my affective experience of Mr Sideki; the
unconscious violence and murderousness beneath the surface of our rela-
tionship.
In order to develop an interpretation the analyst must be willing to con-
front a new monster roaming free in the unconscious. Self-analysis can be
the means by which we work through the anxieties that get in the way of
our being open to new possibilities, new interpretations.

Acknowledgements
I want to thank Chloe Campbell, Gregorio Kohon, Rosine Perelberg,
Anne-Marie Sandler, Mary Target, and David Taylor for their help with
earlier drafts of this paper.

Translations of summary

L’auto-analyse et le de ! veloppement de l’interpre !tation. En d!epit du fait que l’auto-analyse de Freud

ait !et!e au centre de tant de ses d!ecouvertes, l’auto-analyse demeure un exercice complexe, controvers!e et
compliqu!e. Alors qu’on consid"ere le plus souvent que l’auto-analyse !emerge "a la fin d’une analyse et
qu’on l’utilise ensuite comme un crit"ere pour !evaluer la pertinence de sa terminaison, l’auteur de cet arti-
cle a pour vis!ee, quant "a lui, de s’atteler "a la r!esistance "a l’auto-analyse du patient tout au long de l’ana-
lyse. Il consid"ere que le d!eveloppement de la capacit!e d’auto-analyse du patient pendant la s!eance
contribue " a sa croissance et "a la cr!eativit!e et l’ind!ependance de sa pens!ee durant le cours de l’analyse, ce
qui pr!epare le patient ou la patiente "a une vie plus riche une fois l’analyse express!ement termin!ee. Le
mod"ele qu’il pr!esente est bas!e sur l’imbrication de l’auto-analyse du patient et de l’analyste, avec la

Copyright © 2017 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2017) 98

1288 D. Campbell
reconnaissance et l’utilisation du contre-transfert de l’analyste. Il centre son attention sur l’auto-analyse
de l’analyste lorsqu’elle vient r!epondre "a une crise particuli"ere de non savoir se traduisant par un senti-
ment d’enlisement intellectuel et !emotionnel. Cet article n’est pas une !etude de cas, mais un examen
rapide du processus par lequel l’auteur-analyste est pass!e pour arriver "a une interpr!etation particuli"ere
avec un patient particulier "a un moment particulier. L’auteur se concentrera sur les r!esistances en vertu
desquelles le patient et l’analyste sont initialement d!ependants de ce qui est consciemment su.

Selbstanalyse und die Entwicklung einer Deutung. Obwohl Freuds Selbstanalyse im Zentrum zahl-
reicher seiner Entdeckungen stand, bleibt die Selbstanalyse an sich ein schwieriges, umstrittenes und
schwer fassbares Unterfangen. Sie wird h€aufig als ein Ph€ anomen betrachtet, das gegen Ende einer Ana-
lyse auftaucht und dann als Beendigungskriterium dienen kann. Ich m€ ochte hier jedoch den w€ahrend der
gesamten Analyse aktiven Widerstand des Patienten gegen die Selbstanalyse untersuchen. Ich vertrete die
Ansicht, dass die Entwicklung der F€ahigkeit zur Selbstanalyse in der Analysestunde zum Wachstum des
Patienten beitr€agt und seinem kreativen, eigenst€andigen Denken w€ahrend der gesamten Analyse zutr€a-
glich ist. Dies bereitet ihn auf ein erf€
ullteres Leben nach der Beendigung der formalen Analyse vor. Das
€
von mir vorgestellte Modell beruht auf einem Uberlappen der Selbstanalyse des Patienten und der Selb-
stanalyse des Analytikers bei gleichzeitiger Ber€ ucksichtigung und Verwendung der Gegen€ ubertragung des
Analytikers. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit widme ich der Selbstanalyse des Analytikers in Reaktion auf
eine spezifische Krise des Nicht-Wissens, die ihm das Gef€ uhl vermittelt, intellektuell und emotional in
einer Sackgasse zu stecken. Der Beitrag ist keine Fallstudie, sondern wirf einen kurzen Blick auf den
Prozess, den ich durchlief, um in einer bestimmten Sitzung mit einem bestimmten Patienten zu einer
bestimmten Deutung zu gelangen. Ich konzentriere mich auf Widerst€ande, die darauf beruhen, dass Pati-
ent und Analytiker sich auf das, was ihnen bewusst schon bekannt ist, verlassen.

L’autoanalisi e lo sviluppo di un’interpretazione. Sebbene l’autoanalisi sia stata per Freud il fulcro
di molte scoperte, in quanto pratica essa viene a tutt’oggi considerata un esercizio complesso,
controverso e di difficile categorizzazione. Per quanto la si osservi spesso emergere al termine di un’anal-
isi, e venga poi anzi usata come criterio per valutare l’opportunit"a o meno di terminare un’analisi,
l’Autore prova invece a esaminare le resistenze del paziente all’autoanalisi durante il corso dell’analisi
stessa, nella convinzione che lo sviluppo della capacit"a autoanalitica del paziente all’interno della seduta
contribuisca a farlo crescere e lo aiuti a sviluppare un pensiero creativo e indipendente che gli consentir"a
a sua volta di vivere una vita pi" u piena ad analisi ultimata. Il modello qui presentato si basa su una
sovrapposizione dell’autoanalisi del paziente con quella dell’analista, da ottenersi attraverso il riconosci-
mento e l’uso del controtransfert di quest’ultimo. L’articolo si concentra in particolare sull’autoanalisi
dell’analista in quanto risposta a una particolare crisi dovuta al non-sapere – una situazione che porta
alla sensazione di essere intellettualmente ed emotivamente bloccati. Il presente scritto non "e ad ogni
modo un caso clinico, ma piuttosto un rapido sguardo al processo che ha condotto l’Autore a porgere
una particolare interpretazione a un particolare paziente nel corso di una seduta specifica. L’attenzione
sar"a rivolta in particolare alle resistenze nelle quali tanto il paziente quanto l’analista si basano inizial-
mente su quanto "e da loro saputo a livello consapevole.

El autoana ! lisis y el desarrollo de una interpretacio ! n. A pesar de que el autoan!alisis de Freud estuvo
en el centro de muchos de sus descubrimientos, sigue siendo un ejercicio complejo, controvertido y escu-
rridizo. Si bien se considera a menudo que el autoan!alisis surge al final de un an!alisis y por tanto se lo
utiliza como criterio para evaluar si la terminaci! on es apropiada, el autor intenta estar atento a lo largo
del an!alisis a la resistencia del paciente al autoan!alisis. El autor considera que el desarrollo de la capaci-
dad del paciente para el autoan!alisis dentro de la sesi! on anal!ıtica contribuye al crecimiento del paciente
y al pensamiento creativo e independiente durante el an!alisis, lo cual lo prepara para una vida m!as plena
una vez que el an! alisis formal ha terminado. El modelo que el autor presenta se basa en la superposici! on
del autoan! alisis del paciente y el del analista, con el reconocimiento y el uso de la contratransferencia
del analista. El foco del autor est!a puesto en el autoan!alisis del analista en respuesta a una crisis particu-
lar de no saber, que resulta de sentirse atascado intelectual y emocionalmente. Este trabajo no es un
estudio de caso, sino una breve mirada al proceso que vivi! o el autor para llegar a una interpretaci! on
concreta con un paciente concreto durante una sesi! on concreta. El trabajo se concentra en las resisten-
cias tanto del paciente como del analista de las cuales inicialmente basaron lo que se conoce
conscientemente.

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