Starting this thread was prompted by something in a book I just read, The Center Cannot Hold, by Elyn Saks. She is now a tenured professor at the University of Southern California Gould Law School.

Her story is that of someone in and out of what she herself called florid psychosis, which she managed to combat with medication and extensive psychoanalysis, in a heroic struggle lasting many years (and continuing to some extent even now). Towards the end of the book she wrote that she was in training at a psychoanalytic institute, thinking of becoming a psychoanalyst herself. But she changed that idea since publishing the book (in her own name, not a pseudonym), feeling that it might be unfair now to treat clients.

So, that is what prompted my question: thinking as a potential client how I would react to someone whom I thought might still have major challenges of her own. Would that person be able to help me if I entered some kind of crisis? Would that person know herself well enough to be able to see me (or any client) as I am and not replace the actual me in her mind with some person she saw through her own fears as "bad"?

This is not to put down Ms. Saks, since from her writing I see her as just about as honest a person in telling about herself as I have ever read. But my judgement is that there are a lot of people, in and out of this profession, who do not really know the sources of their own feelings and thoughts. When I feel confident I can see these people and not be overly upset by them. If I am not confident, they can evoke a huge amount of fear, since they claim the danger is me and people like me, not them. And I feel they can get a lot of people to agree with them.

TMI?