Routledge Still Practicing: The Heartaches and Joys of a Clinical Career (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

"Still practicing" has several meanings. Still practicing suggests that the balance of heartaches and joys must not deter us from pursuing a clinical practice. At the same time, still practicing suggests that for the clinician "practice" never "makes perfect." We continue to refine our clinical instruments over our entire working lives. Framed by her previous work on the concept of emotional balance, Sandra Buechler investigates how vicissitudes in a clinical career can have a profound and lasting impact on the clinician's emotional balance, and considers how the clinician's resilience is maintained in the face of the personal fallout of a lifetime of clinical practice. At each juncture, from training to early phases of clinical experience, through mid and late career, she asks, what can help us maintain a vital interest in our work? How do we not burn out? Aimed at the nexus of the personal and theoretical, Still Practicing concentrates on the sadness, feelings of shame, and satisfactions inherent in practice, and encourages newcomers and veterans alike to make career choices mindful of their potential long-term impact on their feelings about being therapists. It poses a question vital to the life of the clinician: How can we strike a balance between the work's inevitable pain and its potential joy? Review ‘I am profoundly appreciative of the life lessons I take with me on closing the back cover of this book’ – Cleonie White, Psychotherapy, Vol. 51, N.2, 324-325 "Overwhelmed? Burned out? Wondering if you have missed your chance to deliver your optimum psychoanalytic impact upon the world of psychoanalysis and/or your patients' lives? Sandra Buechler is back again―now in her most seasoned moments―with this timely prescription for and description of the quiet endemic nihilism which plagues so many of our field. She elicits our field's veil of shame, silence, and reluctance to address the struggles she tackles so elegantly. From the refreshing perspective of a lived lifetime, Sandra has just what it takes to speak to all phases of the psychoanalyst's life cycle and, as our unconscious whisperer, to deliver a sustainable blueprint for our hope and change." - Chap Attwell, M.D., NYU School of Medicine "In this compelling meditation on psychoanalytic training and practice, Sandra Buechler bears passionate witness to elements of being and becoming an analyst that few others have described. Never losing compassion for the novice she once was, she offers younger colleagues the most valuable support there is: relentless honesty about the demoralizing, lonely, moving, fascinating, and deeply satisfying world of practice that they are entering. Essential as it will be to psychoanalytic candidates, this book is equally nourishing to the experienced analyst." - Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D., Rutgers Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology "If the concept of 'experience-near' didn't exist in our professional vocabulary, we would have been forced to invent it to describe Sandra Buechler's writing. Unlike much of our professional literature, Buechler is always down-to-earth, avoids idealizations, and pinpoints many experiences in the work of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists which are more often the topic of informal oral discussions among colleagues rather than of written papers and books. She discusses―among many topics―the painful formative experiences of beginners, vulnerable to demoralizing shaming during their training, to toxic work environments, and to the painful impact of very difficult patients (whom senior professionals may prefer not to treat). She discusses the pain of constantly separating from beloved patients through termination, and the even sharper pain when a patient dies. She talks of the anxiety around a diminishing practice, of the dangers of burnout, and of the slow process of developing resilience. I believe each one of us can find herself or himself in some of her vivid and insigh