Abstract

The analyst’s responsibilities seems like a topic that should have been fully discussed in the analytic literature, yet this is not the case. It seems possible it may have been subsumed under the analyst’s ethical behavior, but there are differences described in this paper. The author describes six areas where he sees the analyst’s responsibilities as key. These include: the analyst as a life-long student of psychoanalysis; the capacity to listen to patients and not only ourselves; the patient’s well-being as primary; the analyst’s relationship to his theory of treatment; the capacity to keep the analytic frame; and working with countertransference.