The Analyst’s Vulnerability: Preserving and Fine-Tuning Analytic Bodies

In this chapter, through clinical examples and theoretical reections, we will explore the very underdeveloped concept of analytic vulnerability. Here we concentrate on the impact of clinical work on the body, on embodied cognition, and on the analyst’s psyche-soma. Although great space has been made over a century of thinking about transference and increasing space made for complex countertransference, there is not yet a clear, full registering of analysts’ vulnerability (long term and short term, macro and micro). We want to make a contribution to that project here. Analytic vulnerability, we will argue, is both our greatest gi and our Achilles’ heel.