American Imago

Helfgott, Esther Altshul.
Analytic Entrapment
American Imago - Volume 62, Number 3, Fall 2005, pp. 339-363

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Esther Altshul Helfgott - Analytic Entrapment - American Imago 62:3 American Imago 62.3 (2005) 339-363 Analytic Entrapment Esther Altshul Helfgott Healing Arts Program Cancer Lifeline Dorothy O'Brien Center 6522 Fremont Ave. North Seattle, WA 98103 eahelfgott@comcast.net [Erratum] [From January 1990 to June 1994], I underwent a four-and-a-half year, five-day-a-week analysis with a traditional male Freudian psychoanalyst (or he tried to behave that way). The maternal aspects of the analysis were wonderfully gentle, but the paternal/fraternal aspects were horrendous. He came to hold an incredible amount of power over me and would not help me leave, terminate, be done with the process that was, from the beginning, highly sexualized and erotic. . . . He refused to confront the "here and now" between us, always taking me back to my past; in so doing, he helped repeat/reenact a condition that brought me to analysis in the first place. . . . In the end, I thought he would keep me there forever . . . and so I left. Eventually I came back to the study of psychoanalysis, which is, with all its faults, one of my intellectual homes. --Esther Altshul Helfgott, The Psychoanalytic Experience: Analysands Speak In 1978, when I was thirty-seven years old, a single parent of three, a doctoral student in history, and a housemate with my seventy-nine-year-old mother, I entered into a therapeutic relationship that would last until the week of September 11, 2001. The first...