______________________________________
3/11
Steven Kuchuck, LCSW
When the Personal Becomes Professional:
Clinical Implications of the
Psychoanalyst’s Subjectivity
In this paper, Steven Kuchuck explores the impact of the psychoanalyst’s life experience and psychological make-up on the treatment. By expanding psychoanalytic study beyond theory and technique to include an examination of events in the clinician’s childhood and adult life as well as related psychodynamic issues, Kuchuck focuses on ways in which these experiences, crises, and dynamics affect both clinical choices and the tenor of the therapist’s presence in the consulting room. Related, he looks at the relationship between the clinician’s subjectivity, theoretical interests, and technique, and explores areas of overlap and differentiation between two phenomena that are often confused; the larger issue of the therapist’s subjectivity, and self-disclosure.
When subjectivity becomes bracketed or dissociated, access to countertransference and insight into how the analyst affects the patient becomes limited; therapeutic data may be missed. Kuchuck therefore addresses various ways of tracking and using subjectivity in order to further the therapeutic action. He also considers the impact on the treatment of the therapist’s temperament, conflicts around being seen, and struggles with self-care.
Steven Kuchuck, LCSW is the Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Associate Editor of
Routledge’s Relational Perspectives Book Series, Board Member, supervisor, faculty and Co-Director of Curriculum for the training program in adult psychoanalysis at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), and
Routledge’s Relational Perspectives Book Series, Board Member, supervisor, faculty and Co-Director of Curriculum for the training program in adult psychoanalysis at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), and
faculty/supervisor at the NIP National Training Program, the Stephen Mitchell Center for
Relational Studies, and other institutes. He is on the Board of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy where he co-chairs the Local (international) Chapters Committee, on the steering committee for the 2017 APA Division 39 annual conference, and co-chair of the Division 39 International Outreach Task Force. His writing focuses primarily on the analyst’s subjectivity and most recently, he is a contributor to and editor of Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional (Routledge, 2014), The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor (co-edited with Adrienne Harris, Routledge, 2015), and an upcoming volume of analysts writing about the professional impact of their own analysis (Routledge, in press).
