“ After I had been practicing analysis for 50 years, I asked myself: What was the most important thing I learned in those 50 years? It took me a lot of time to learn the obvious: the patient is somebody else.”
Warren Poland, MD
Washington D.C.
Episode Description:
Dr. Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Warren Poland, who is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington DC. Dr. Poland is a former editor of the JAPA Review of Books and he has been on the Board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly for over 40 years. Dr. Poland was awarded the Sigourney Prize in 2009 and the JAPA Journal Prize in 2002. In addition to many articles, Dr. Poland has written two books, Melting the Darkness: The Dyad and Principles of Clinical Practice and his most recent work: Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis.
During this episode, Dr. Poland shares what it means to him to be vulnerable in this time as well as his sense of responsibility to others. He describes how the centrality of the recognition of the other gives rise to the recognition of aspects of responsiveness and separateness between people. His goal is to appreciate the patient as an other as well as for the patient to recognize his separateness.
Key Takeaways:
[7:02] Dr. Poland shares his perspective with regard to the current crisis.
[9:33] Life can be terrifying for our species; all we can do is hope and work for the future.
[10:45] The future needs us.
[10:58] Dr. Poland talks about his analytic journey.
[12:58] What is like to be somebody else?
[16:33] ´There is a real person in there´.
[17:50] Dr. Poland talks about the obstacles that prevent truly engaging with a patient.
[18:40] Psychoanalysis is the discipline that studies the matters that the patient does not want to confront.
[20:30] The patient reads the analyst even better than the analyst does.
[21:50] Nobody lives outside the fabric of the human interchange.
[23:55] Dr. Poland shares a moment that describes his sensitive eye for people’s self-aggrandizing tendencies.
[27:07] Dr. Poland talks about how he deals with his patients that are struggling with financial situations.
[28:25] It is important that a patient is able to fire a doctor.
[30:35] If you want your patients to come back, tell them something they could use, and then they will want to come back for more.
[32:55] Dr. Poland dives deep into the fullness of conversation.
[35:46] What is human and humane is regard for the other.
[36:44] Dr. Poland talks about the intimacy about what is true without the fear of showing vulnerability.
[39:56] The core of conversation and vulnerability is the realization of reciprocity.
Mentioned in This Episode
IPA Off the Couch – www.ipaoffthecouch.org
Melting the Darkness: The Dyad and Principles of Clinical Practice, Dr. Warren Poland
Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis, Dr. Warren Poland
Alexander Saez
December 24, 2020
I am especially grateful to Dr. Harvey Schwartz for this witty and sparkling interview! Perhaps for the first time since I’ve been listening to these ‘episodes’ I clearly heard this lovely word ‘theory’ and cheered up. After all very often our craft is perceived as a bare practice (medical or psychological), hence the phrases such as psychoanalytic tools, p.a. space, p.a. experience etc.
But what can we answer the inevitable questions of our patients and students about our theory (i.e. the single scientific framework that unites all our principles)?
I am sure that we would all like to hear more about this matter in future interviews with such real and indisputable authorities in this field as Warren Poland.
Thank you very much for your time and Merry Christmas to all of us!
Dr. Poland. In listening to your seemingly simple, yet fundamentally vast implications for analytic work – and relationships with others, I am moved by the richness of this conversation with Dr. Schwartz. I am in the home stretch of candidacy and writing my paper on loneliness, which includes the musings on the mutuality in the patient/analyst relationship. Your voice will now be included in that section, for which I thank you. Like others, I will now forward this conversation to colleagues and friends and order your book. With much appreciation for your candor and honesty…..
Yes, my vanity is part of what is touched by what you write, but what lasts beyond the next blinking of my eye is my sense of comfort and reassurance of the commonality of individual humanity – always unique and individual in its particularity and specificity, yet the essential connection and comfort that lies in the white spaces between the letters and the spaces between the lines of our conversations. Your own feelings seem to me touch the heart of loneliness when we connect, connect without losing either our selves or our recognition of the uniqueness of other selves. You remind us that loneliness implies longing, which itself implies both the unique others who are missed plus also the sense of oneself as a real person even while feeling bereft.
Your comments, and undoubtedly as well as what you are writing about loneliness, are shaped by your generosity of spirit. Thank you.
Wow did I ever need to hear every word you shared with us, Dr. Poland! THANK YOU. I just ordered your book and wish I could give you a big hug. All the best to you. I hope to one day hold your gentle, reassuring wisdom and grace.
In simple candor, I am deeply moved by the personal, indeed intimate, generosity of all of these comments (and not so vain as to fail to recognize that those with other reactions perhaps kindly have not written). Also, in similar openness, I appreciate that their warmth is an expression of each of those writers of their own struggle to be openly engaged in respecting individuality and otherness, not simply “defending” themselves, as they work daily to help others come to peace with themselves. Thank you, your remarks should leave all of us a touch less lonely in our working lives in intimate separateness (to refer to Leo Stone’s felicitous phrase).
I am one of bill granitir hers patients. Just writing in support of your work. His theory of a multiplier effect is obvious in my life.
Thank you for your echo of reassurance, something I suspect we all need from time to time as we live in a state of uncertainty, trying always to stay true to our patient’s meanings, using our theories as cogent questions from the sidelines and not as a mold to shape official understandings.
Enchanting conversation, after listening for the third time I ordered from Karnac the two books mentioned and cannot wait to read them! I listened your interview for the Sigourney award as well.
I learned so much from you (and your gifted supervisor who gave the advice of giving a quantity enough for making the patient come back for more – I believe the idea here was that we can benefit from smaller portions, we can better assimilate in steps instead of having a big quantity at once). Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience. My kind regards, Patricia
I’m so thankful to you, Dr Poland. I too listened twice and yes, there will be a third and a forth, no doubt. Your generosity of spirit shines through and I found I was deeply moved and inspired by listening to your experience in the consulting room and beyond. Now, I’m off to search for your book. Many blessings. Jan May (London).
Thank you so much for this gift. I’ve listened to it twice and imagine there will be at least a third. I’ve forwarded the link to a non-analyst friend of mine, and then to all of my training class at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center. I learned a lot from this.
Again, thank you.
Ed Lowery
I am, in simple truth, touched by your generosity. I take it primarily to be an agreement about the essential nature of respect for the other, a universal realization we all share but from time to time need to stop and recall.
Thank you.