A Tale of Two Analyses: A Dialogic Return

Abstract

This article focuses on my experience in personal analysis, with a focus on my second analysis, when I was a young psychiatrist in Winnipeg, 1975–1979. A brief autobiographical report and account of my first analysis (1968–1970) provides important context for the direction I take in describing my second analysis. My engagement with selected moments of my second analysis are dialogic contextual in that my memories emerge as reconstructed narratives infused with new meaning, informed by both the subsequent history of my psychoanalytic journey, a journey itself intertwined with the emergence of the field of psychoanalysis itself from a classic Freudian one-person psychology to contemporary relational systems perspectives. My analysis is shown to constitute a dual track process whereby a surface Freudian track coincided with an unconscious embodied relational track.