A Changing Inner Self

As a practitioner of clinical psychoanalysis I am the newcomer in this group, having opened a practice less than two years ago. As a candidate in training, now in my third year, I am finding analytic work to be rewarding and challenging beyond what I might ever have imagined. Candidacy at a psychoanalytic institute, which to me recalls aspects (good and bad) of being both a graduate student and a junior faculty member, becomes more and more absorbing as you progress through the five or more years it takes to graduate, so I am speaking to you from a place of immersion and great enthusiasm, combined with occasional frustration. That is the gist of my current new, nonacademic life. But given that my experience as a clinician is short, while my career in academia was long, in these remarks I'll be talking mostly about my recent journey from one professional identity to the other, and how the programs we're highlighting here today were important to me along the way.

I should explain that although I was on the faculty at NYU for fifteen years and at Duke for a decade before that, my home for nearly twenty years has been in Philadelphia. If there was a practical aspect to my decision to become an analyst, it had to do with the wish to combine my personal and professional lives in one place, and the recognition that commuting was starting to wear me out and head me into early retirement, when ideally what I wanted was to continue working long into my older years. But practicality wasn't really at the heart of it. For me it was more of a return to a path not taken, as I had been premed for most of my time in college but ultimately not gone that route into clinical practice. At the same time, it became clear to me that the aspects of my academic career I found most meaningful involved one-on-one human contact—advising, mentoring, and even the problem-solving side of chairing a department. The intellectual move I had already made from scholarship in colonial Latin American studies to translation theory and practice was consistent with the wish for greater intimacy in my work, as literary translation, to my way of thinking, in essence comprises a most intimate relationship between translator, text, and author. These were things I had known about myself for a long time, and that were reemerging as a result of my own psychoanalysis and personal development.

Psychoanalytic training has three components: course work concentrated on theory and practice, supervised clinical work with patients, and a personal analysis. While the most frequent path to involvement with psychoanalysis starts with the clinical side, stemming from a career in one of the fields of mental health, for academics in the humanities it could start with either of the other two. It could be a resonance with the ideas and theories of psychoanalysis and a conviction about the value of those ideas as a way of approaching culture and the arts. Or it could be the transformative experience of one's own analysis. Although psychoanalytic theory has always been part of my own intellectual toolkit, I could not remotely make the claim to being primarily a psychoanalytic literary critic or historian. It was my own analysis that proved to be the central piece I wanted to put into practice, using it to connect with other people.

So in 2002 I became an Academic Fellow at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, which the year before had just begun to exist as one entity, the result of an historic reunification of two analytic groups that had separated fifty years before. I was directed to the Fellowship program by my own analyst, after I'd started making noises about wanting to change my career. As a fellow I had two mentors. My first mentor and I thought and read about the relations between translation and psychoanalysis, specifically focused on the translation I was then doing of Jesús Díaz's novel The Initials of the Earth (published by Duke University...