ABSTRACT
Perhaps most analysts were introduced to the mysteries of psychoanalytic technique as I was: that it was not so much a cohesive body of structured knowledge and practice as a loose collection of do's and don'ts. A chill in the heart warned me that to violate any one of them would ruin the analysis. Cowering before gray eminences, I and my fellow candidates had a bad case of transference to the Institute, for none of our teachers had literally laid down any such doctrine. It was more that no one troubled to disabuse us of the idea that, if somehow we were lucky enough to avoid all the pitfalls set by our natural enemy, the patients, the residue of our avoidance would be pure essence of psychoanalysis. We feared analysis was a fragile flower, one easily crushed in the hands of clumsy beginners. And the patients, we feared, were secretly out to do us in, to abort our nascent careers. Simply through recalcitrance, they could keep us from graduating. It took a while to discover that our patients were even more frightened than we were. It took more time to discover that analysis is not a fragile flower, but a sturdy affair. What we once regarded as fatal mistakes turned out mostly not to matter that much; sins of omission—what we failed to do—proved much more harmful.
