ABSTRACT
This chapter contains my reflections about how I use my self in my work with patients, how my patients have affected and helped me learn about myself as well as about them, and the psychoanalytic process over a professional lifetime. I reflect on how what is personal is an inevitable part of the process in our work with patients. Different aspects of us emerge in each treatment. I describe how the illness and death of my son also changed me and my work. It is inevitable that we can be both enabled and disabled by what is personal—our characters, conflicts, life experiences interface with our patients’,- leading us to both grow in the process of our work together.
