On using our patients during this difficult political moment

In this essay, I consider various ways in which we psychoanalysts sometimes use our patients and profession to assuage feelings of despair, helplessness, rage, and guilt during this fraught political time. I describe how doing this can both collide with aspects of the analytic ideal and advance our therapeutic aims. By way of illustration, I discuss some of my own work as a psychoanalyst. Writings of Aron, Aronson, Hirsch, Searles, Slochower, and others are employed to elucidate this theme.