ABSTRACT
Nancy McWilliams teaches at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers and practises in western New Jersey. A former president of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association, she has authored three textbooks, now in twenty languages, and edited the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual. She imagines that being a therapist is a displaced way to take care of the wounded child in herself. The idea that psychoanalysis works by the process of interpretation leading to insight is a partial truth. As Dr McWilliams points out, “Some people stay forever with insight and do nothing,” and often understanding comes as a result of change. Her patient who repeatedly fell in love, married, and then devalued his wife, enacted the same pattern in the transference with her. Psychoanalysis can be entered with an unconscious phantasy of being reborn, and, if all goes usefully, end with some letting go of grievance and acceptance of loss.
