ABSTRACT
As night follows day, my engagement with psychoanalysis as a therapist was followed by an engagement with it as a patient. I will describe three encounters with psychotherapists in order to trace out the process by which people find a psychoanalyst. It is not easy to find one when you need one, as you will see. It is not wise, of course, to believe what someone says about their failed encounters with others they have had such intimate relationships with, nor to believe what they say about their successful encounters. I had plenty of suppositions about psychoanalytic theory that framed what I was looking for in a practitioner, suppositions that are worked on, elaborated and worked through in the clinic as what psychoanalysts call ‘transference’.
