Search

Marie and Elizabeth believe that if our attachment to out patient, and reciprocally, our patient's attachment to us, is secure enough (p. 207), they will go on working through the disruptions and repairs inevitably find them. UNC trained its nursing students to care for their patients as whole people, and looking back, Elizabeth sees her education there as her first encounter with self psychology, as yet unarticulated. When the editors of PSC invited us associate editors to interview a modern contributor to self psychology, I immediately knew I would choose Elizabeth Carr. Imagine being encouraged to "sense what my patient is telling me in a particular moment [and] to understand as fully as possible my patient's experience ... and to communicate my understanding to my patient and then closely track her responses ... " (Carr, [2], p. 739). [Extracted from the article]

Hoping to create my own analytic voice, I experienced complex pressure to conform to the venerated rules of American ego psychology. I could find myself looking over my shoulder, and my training could become saturated with received ideas. Using complex systems theory as a ground, I contrast the constricting pressure to conform that I experienced with three supervisors with the openness that I found with my fourth. I propose that analytic training is a nonlinear, complex developmental process that occurs in a space of "chaotic possibilities" (Glatzer-Levy, 2004) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]