ABSTRACT
The seamless integration of the inner, intimate personal experience, with the outer world of social context and structure, its expectations and responsibilities, privileges, prohibitions, and rewards, is the fundamental dilemma in attaining an integrated identity. The practice of psychoanalysis provides psychoanalyst with a social role that allows and sanctions the utilisation of this hypersensitivity. The psychoanalytic identity, more so than most other identities, places the psychoanalytic practitioner at the boundary between the inner and outer worlds. The boundary is an area where numerous difficult and thorny endeavours take place. It is the sphere in which leadership is exercised, but also where enemies are identified and targeted. The preferential leaning and exclusionist bias of the psychoanalytic identity towards the inner world, continuity of experience, fantasy constructions and their “unreal” ramifications—all of these find expression in the analyst’s personal mode of life and the analytic setting he creates and maintains for his analysands.
