How We Psychoanalysts Go About Our Work

At one of my last consults with Abbas Jama, M.D., my former treating psychiatrist, in June 2010, I told Dr. Jama that I engaged in self-analysis.  I told him that I try to psychoanalyze myself, and that I had been doing that for years.  Dr. Jama was skeptical.  He said one could not psychoanalyze oneself, that a person needed another person, an objective individual, to listen and provide unbiased feedback.

My thoughts went back to my very first consult with Dr. Jama, in July 2009.  At that time I told Dr. Jama that I had sued my former employer.  He asked me if I had a lawyer to represent me.  I told Dr. Jama that I had represented myself.  Dr. Jama said I should have hired a lawyer, that one did not have the objectivity necessary to represent oneself.  I remember I told Dr. Jama the famous observation of Abraham Lincoln: "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client."

I recently thought of something that perhaps places Dr. Jama's comments about self-analysis and self-representation in a sexual context.  At one of my last consults with Dr. Jama, in June 2010, he asked me several questions about masturbation.  "How often do you do it, how do you do it, do you use sex toys?"  His questions were not coercive or judgmental.  He seemed to ask these questions out of pure curiosity.  But I wonder, based on his negative views about self-analysis and legal self representation, whether there was not an underlying negative implication about his questions.  If I were a psychoanalyst, I would keep that notion in mind.  We psychoanalysts place everything about our patients -- statements, inflection, body language -- in a context.  We draw meaning from patterns of thought and feeling.