ABSTRACT

This chapter explores to identify and attempt to understand the nature and motivations underlying analysts' tendency to commit small delinquencies. It brings the issues into the arena of dialogue with the explicit intention of changing problematic aspects of professional behavior. Professional misdemeanors represent another dimension of the malignant underbelly of the analytic position that Irwin Hoffman describes. He focuses on how analysts can exploit their professional role to feed their narcissism or enjoy a sense of control or power. Indeed, the clash between these minor acts of psychopathy and the analytic ideal can result in a quasi-conscious disavowal of professional breaches. It is difficult to delineate precisely which aspects of professional behavior constitute misdemeanors, for this category inevitably overlaps with both enactments and more serious analytic crimes. Analytic misdemeanors take different forms and have different effects when they are committed secretly, as one saw in Dr. M's secret magazine reading, and when they are open and blatant.