PETER LOEWENBERG
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caution stands affirmed by experience . The one caveat I would make
is that the parent's psychoanalysis is often affirmed as prophylactic
for the children. I have had a number of parents tell me that it is
their children who are the real beneficiaries of the parent's analysis
because the unconscious replication of their own parents' child-rais–
ing patterns, of both displaced aggressive and inhibited libidinal
behavior, is at last broken by the insight offered by psychoanalysis.
In this generational sense, prophylaxis may be effective. Only
analysis offers the depth of working through insights to radically
alter the kind of unconscious programming involved in parent-child
communication.
Freud's call for periodic re-analysis of analytic practitioners is a
recognition of the subjective nature of psychoanalytic cognition, of
the fact that no psychoanalyst can analyze past his or her own
resistances.
If
a psychoanalyst has a scotomized emotional percep–
tion, his analysands will have circumscribed and incomplete
analyses with certain unanalyzed and untouched areas. Indeed,
when one sees generations of analysands from the same psycho–
analytic couches, particular analytic
lacunae,
psychoanalytic styles,
unanalyzed character traits, or transferential materials are distinctly
perceptible and identifiable with given analysts.
Analysis should be a lifelong process, not only because of the
analyst's resistances and re-repressions, but also because of the life
changes humans experience. Events such as marriage and divorce,
the birth of children, the death of parents, becoming a parent of
adolescents and eventually a grandparent - as well as other viscis–
situdes of life such as disease, political, social, and natural events
which cause dislocation or trauma - generate new intrapsychic prob–
lems which in fact are not coexistent at any particular time. Through
each passing decade, the analyst is in another stage of the life cycle
and meeting different existential situations .
There is also a problem with the translation of Freud's original
title, "Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse." I would translate
this as "The Ending and the Unending Analysis." "Endliche" means
finite, something that comes to an end . "Unendliche" suggests the in–
finite, the endless, the analysis without limit. Freud was not writing
of the termination of a particular phase of analysis as a technical
problem. He was saying analysis is unending, should never be ended,
cannot be ended . Analysts and analysands must continue to ex–
amine their unconscious all of their lives. His message is that
analysis is infinite - it is a lifetime project.
