In a certain sense, the question of what it means to be a psychoanalyst is partly a question of what we do. As psychoanalysts, we undergo a very long training, which prepares us, in essence, to develop what Keats called "negative capability" — the capacity to quiet oneself internally in order to create a space and genuinely try to know the person in front of us, and what is happening within them.
This, in fact, is what empathy is: you quiet yourself and make room for the other. You use your own emotional system to connect with them and think alongside them. The idea is to quiet the internal noise, to attune, to genuinely try to know the person before you, and to let their unconscious emerge.
You create a space in which things can appear that the person themselves had not suspected. And when this happens — you truly come to know them. And you begin to care about them.
Learning this is a long process. And it passes precisely through one's own analysis and psychotherapy, and later, during practice, through supervision.
And perhaps the hardest part of this training is not the mastery of technique, but the gradual relinquishing of what the psyche clings to most: the wish to know in advance, to categorise, to recognise the familiar where what is actually present is the unfamiliar. One's own analysis teaches precisely this — to tolerate periods in which you understand nothing, in which the patient is unintelligible even to themselves, and not to fill that emptiness with a premature interpretation or a reassuring explanation.
Bion called this reverie — a state in which the analyst allows themselves to receive the undigested, unformulated fragments of another's experience, without rushing to give them shape. This is not passivity. It is, on the contrary, a highly active internal labour, one that requires endurance, discipline, and, to a considerable degree, trust in a process one does not control.
And here lies the paradox of our profession: the better trained you are technically, the less technical intervention is actually needed in the room. Presence — genuine, not performed — matters more than any intervention. The patient senses the difference between an analyst who listens in order to respond, and an analyst who listens in order to let something new emerge.
Supervision, in this sense, is not a quality control of one's work, but a space in which the analyst can see their own blind spots, their own countertransference, that which interferes with their listening. Because we too carry noise within us — and the task is not to rid ourselves of it entirely, which is impossible, but to learn to recognise it and not mistake it for the content the patient brings.
I work with adults and couples, including international and intercultural couples, online. In Ukrainian and English.