ABSTRACT
Change is bidirectional, and there is no reason that this should not be true of the psychoanalytic situation. The analysts in this survey have almost exclusively reported positive psychological changes in themselves that they believe resulted from their work with patients. The fact that analysts choose to report positive and not negative outcomes is not surprising. A contributing factor may be that the way the questions were posed did not invite responses about negative changes. To obtain descriptions of unfavorable outcomes would have required that I inquired in fairly specific ways about patients' potential negative impact on their analysts. Future projects might do this; however, I suspect the return will be low. Analysts, like all people, are likely to be eager to relate occurrences that they are proud of, since they enhance self-esteem; they are less likely to volunteer to relate experiences that they regret, that they wished had had a different, more favorable outcome.
