Fred Busch on How Does Analysis Cure?

October 2nd, 2026 • 58:27

Transcript Note: I have taken the liberty to edit this transcript for clarity and readability purposes. I trust you will find the substance and meaning preserved.

An Interview with Fred Busch by Daniel T. Bourne

Understanding Psychoanalytic Cure

Daniel T. Bourne:
Dr. Fred Busch, thank you for joining me.

Fred Busch:
Pleasure to be here.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Your most recent book, How Does Analysis Cure?, came out in 2005 [*a Freudian slip right off the bat. It came out in 2025]. And I don’t know if you saw or not, but Dr. Mark Solms recently released a book called The Only Cure, so those came out somewhat in tandem. I thought this could be a good chance to talk with you about a similar topic.

In your book, you wrote:

“There are two main factors that drive the patient to repeat, and repeat again, unconscious conflicts and fantasies, that limit his potential, and can derail any relationship. The first is the insufficiency of representations, and the second is the tendency toward action and what I call ‘language action’ … They are both an essential part of a psychoanalytic cure.”

Can you talk a little bit about those two factors and expound upon that?

Fred Busch:
Sure. Well, a while back (I can’t remember exactly when), I realized that when people have these insufficient representations, what that means is essentially words, language, for what they’re experiencing.

It tends to come out as action potentials. What I mean by that is not necessarily motoric action, but the ways that people can express themselves in words, and another person who they’re talking to will start to feel something. You don’t realize where it’s coming from, but it’s the way the person is talking that leads you to feel that particular way. That’s what I call language action.

A person’s talking, it seems like they’re just talking like a regular person, and you’re feeling depressed, you’re feeling stupid, you’re feeling all kinds of things. That’s what language action is.

And the less, well, let me see, the more immature the representation, the more likely a person will communicate in language action.

Daniel T. Bourne:
When it comes to insufficiency of representations, my first thought when reading that was: if I’m having difficulty imagining a different mode of being, or a different option, or a different way of doing something… is that not what you’re saying there?

Fred Busch:
It’s – let me put it this way. It’s more the individual’s inability to put their own experience into words.

And what, at least how I see treatment going, is that what we’re attempting to do with our patients, in highly simplified terms, is to help them put words to their experiences so that it’s not just something that they feel, but something that they can think about and make a choice, when before they didn’t have a choice.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah. Two things there.

That makes sense. Something clicked. I remember you in the book talking about, once they have sufficient representation, then there is a container. There is now some place to put their experience, and they can talk about it and reflect on it and think about it.

And then you just said something, someone once told me: that free will isn’t a given; it’s cultivated.

Would you agree with that similar kind of sentiment?

Fred Busch:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a wonderful way to put it.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Okay. So they have people go through life experiencing all of this, and if they don’t have maybe a frame for it or a structure for it, they’re just holding all of that experience. And if they’re unable to verbalize it, maybe it colors them and becomes them in a way that they start acting.

And you talk about language action. So maybe there’s a part of them that wants someone else to put words to their experience if they’re unable to, and the way that they go about talking and living and communicating brings about the experience in someone else.

Fred Busch:
It depends. That’s a good question.

Some of these things that people can’t put into words are things that are terrifying to them, or really frightening to them.

For example, a young child, let’s say, who is particularly frustrated by a parent, feels absolutely enraged with that parent. Do they want to know that they’re enraged? Or is it scary to them to think how enraged they are and that they want to kill that parent? It’s probably more scary than anything.

And so those are the kinds of things that people, growing up, find terrifying to know about. It’s still there in the background — that this rage that they experience is associated with killing somebody who they’re totally dependent upon.

So that’s when you get people who deny that they’re ever angry. They may seem, they communicate their anger, and you say, “God, you seem so angry,” and they say, “Me? I’m not angry.”

That’s because they’re terrified of their anger.

So to help… as a therapist or analyst, when you see how angry a patient can be and they have no awareness of it, you just can’t point it out to them. It’s like saying to somebody, “You’re speaking Russian,” and the person says, “I don’t know Russian. I can’t speak Russian.”

So it’s very difficult to accept and appreciate because there are such defenses against it. That’s why it’s not so easy.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah. For them, if you say something like, “You seem quite angry,” you might as well be saying, “You want to kill your father, don’t you?”

Fred Busch:
Right. Exactly. Right. Right. Or your mother, or your brother, or your sister, or all of them.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah. Or all of them.

Okay. So them holding that in and either defending against the knowledge of that, or not knowing where to put it, or how to deal with it… but it inevitably, what is it that Freud said? “It oozes out of every pore.” It inevitably comes out, and maybe it comes out in language action.

Fred Busch:
Right, right, right. And sometime along the way somebody says to this person, “You’re a really angry person,” and they have no idea. They can’t know what you’re talking about because it means something entirely different to them.

So to get to that stage of having them be able to see it involves working through the resistances against seeing it. That’s a different process.

A person will be talking – I’ve used this example many times – The patient will be talking about a roommate and say, “God, they’re really annoying. They never clean up their dishes. They leave shit hanging all over the apartment,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then they’ll stop and say, “But they’re really a nice person.”

There you can help a person see that it seems like something just happened where they were complaining about the roommate, but they felt something that scared them, that made it seem like it was too frightening to keep on going.

So that’s how you help a person begin to see that they’re very anxious about any kind of angry feeling.

Daniel T. Bourne:
That was something I found quite helpful in the book when you would distinguish between the classically oriented approach of just interpreting versus cluing the patient, or the analysand, in on your interpretation.

I wanted you to talk a little bit more about the importance not just in making interpretations, but in clarifying where your interpretation came from.

The Role of Language in Therapy

Fred Busch:
Right. Right.

What my method is based upon is ultimately helping patients see that how they will understand themselves is by listening to their own mind, not by trying to remember what the therapist or analyst said was the problem.

I’m just paying attention to seeing what’s going on in their own mind.

Otherwise, the treatment that one is doing is limited to, say, the problem a person has right at this moment.

I’ve labeled one paper I wrote recently, Analyzing Towards the Future, in which I’m trying to get people to realize that the way they understand themselves is by listening to what’s in their mind.

And that becomes, not easy, but a way of dealing with problems as they keep on coming up in life.

I mean, what may be troubling you when you’re thirty, when you go into treatment, may be different when you’re fifty. So this method helps with dealing with a lifespan of problems.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah. And that’s the distinction you make between state knowledge and process knowledge.

Fred Busch:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Daniel T. Bourne:

So you would see in psychoanalysis the cure being the increased ability to make representations and the increased ability to pause and reflect upon your thoughts before you put them into action.

Fred Busch:
Well said. Well said.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Okay.

There was a lot of perhaps more classical emphasis on insight. And then we came to find out that insight wasn’t enough. There has to be a working-through process.

Would you say that – did Freud talk a lot about the ability to think about your thoughts as well?

Fred Busch:
Not really. Not really.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah, okay.

If I could interrupt your thought for a moment… you mentioned you’ve learned a lot, or gotten a lot, from French authors. I don’t know if that’s the connection, but maybe can you talk a little bit about what brought you to the point of emphasizing thinking about thinking and this process knowledge?

Fred Busch:
I was just thinking about that as well before you asked the question.

Because, they’re the ones who I think speak most complexly about building representations.

André Green has a quote, I’m sure I’m going to screw it up, but it’s like: by building representations, we build a container… I can’t remember exactly how it goes. 

But essentially that’s what he’s saying: you build a container whereby it’s a lot easier to contain what these more intense feelings are.

There’s a whole school of the French… It’s called the Paris Psychosomatic School, and what they came to realize is, you know, the classic, or what used to be the classic, psychoanalytic concept of psychosomatic illness was that the psychosomatic illness was based upon an expression of an unconscious fantasy.

So, for example, asthma was “the lungs were weeping,” something like that.

What the French Psychosomatic School has come to… What characterizes psychosomatic patients is, again, a failure of representation and the capacity for concrete thinking and a whole bunch of other characteristics.

So in some ways they’ve led the elaboration of these ideas of representation.

Other people see it as coming from someplace else, but to me they have the most complete ideas about building representations and why it works.

Daniel T. Bourne:
This is – I am very naive when it comes to Lacan – but talking about language, I think he’s talked about the unconscious as structured like a language.

Were these French authors that you were influenced by also influenced by Lacan?

Fred Busch:
Well, everybody in Paris was influenced by Lacan, but they grew beyond him.

He was a very controversial figure, and so they were both influenced in terms of his understanding of language but also had to go beyond him in order to — Not be crazy [ha ha ha]

Daniel T. Bourne:
I see [ha ha]

Would you consider yourself a contemporary psychoanalyst, an ego psychoanalyst? Where would you place yourself?

Ego Psychology and Its Importance

Fred Busch:
Yeah. People label me as an ego psychologist, and certainly from the very beginning I was very much focused on that particular area.

And it’s still… The importance of the ego in psychoanalytic treatment, psychoanalytic theory, is still something that I focus on. And it’s underemphasized in many theories.

What’s interesting is that one of the people who was one of the leaders in developing ego psychology back in the fifties… you know, there was this group of Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein. And Loewenstein actually lived in Paris a number of years before coming to the United States.

So he had some effect in terms of an ego-psychological perspective on French psychoanalysis.

And one of the French analysts, Marilia Aisenstein, in reviewing one of my books, reminded her colleagues that ego psychology was part of French psychoanalysis for some time in the fifties and sixties … So let’s not turn our noses up at it.

Daniel T. Bourne:
I had a couple questions on that.

One was: what do you think ego psychology got right, or gets right, that later schools sometimes forget?

You mentioned that maybe it’s sometimes underemphasized. What do you think those later schools would do well to remember or to keep?

Fred Busch:
Right. Well, one thing is defense analysis. I mean, that is, (and how you do it), is something that ego psychology has laid out very carefully, and many don’t pay any attention to it whatsoever.

So, for example, silence in psychoanalytic sessions.

The patient is going along and talking, and they suddenly fall silent.

An ego psychologist would try to find out: what is it that happened at that moment that led them to become silent?

Other points of view would focus on what comes after the silence. That is, it’ll tell something else.

And I don’t think you can ignore that something happened in the person’s mind at that point that led to the silence.

So I think certain other perspectives are missing that central point of — I’ll again call it — a defense.

And also what people can listen to and hear.

I recently read an article by John Steiner, and he’s one of the premier Kleinians. His patient was talking, and he was talking about not being heard. He felt that Steiner wasn’t hearing him.

Now, Steiner, instead of seeing, “Well, what else might come? How might we understand it?” Is it possible that he’s not hearing that person? Steiner instead comes up with an interpretation that this patient is competing with Steiner for who’s going to be the one who determines what happens in the session.

And he says it to the patient, and the patient is… Well, it goes kablooey, et cetera, et cetera.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Okay. I’m going to try to remember, I want to bring it back to ego psychology, but that reminds me: I’m also quite ignorant about Kleinian views.

You mentioned in the book how they can overemphasize aggression. And I think that’s perhaps a good example there – competition and aggression.

But in the book you talk about, in the chapter Are You Talking to Me?, whether something is aggression or a defensive enactment — self-protection.

Could you give an example of how whether you see it as aggression or self-protection changes the way that you work with the phenomena?

Fred Busch:
Absolutely.

Say a patient gets angry at you in a session.

If you see it as just their aggression coming out, like a drive derivative, then you would talk about it one way.

If you see it as the person’s reaction to something that just happened that makes them feel uncomfortable, that’s leading them to be aggressive as a defense, you treat it entirely differently.

So that makes a big difference.

And most Kleinians would see it as aggression rather than self-protection.

Daniel T. Bourne:
And with the idea that it’s self-protection, is it right to say that that directly comes from an ego-psychological point of view?

Maybe they wouldn’t feel the need to do that unless they were under a considerable amount of pain.

Fred Busch:
Mm-hmm.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Do you make a distinction between resistance and defenses?

Fred Busch:
Not really.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Okay.

Fred Busch:
No. The simple answer is no.

Daniel T. Bourne:
In the book you talk about the difference between Model One versus Model Two of the mind and how this relates to the role of the ego and of resistance.

Can you elaborate a little bit on that here in conversation?

Fred Busch:
If you remind me what I said about Model One, I would be happy to talk to you about it [ha ha ha].

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah. You talked a bit about… I think this was in an area where you were mentioning, let’s say, you work with the preconscious.

Model One, I think, was Strachey’s understanding of anxiety, or Freud’s talking on anxiety, and the way that you interpret it.

Versus Model Two is more like your method, I believe, of working more with the preconscious.

Fred Busch:
Right.

Let me just remember.

Model One is — if I remember how I talked about it —

It’s really based upon Freud’s first theory of anxiety. He had two theories of anxiety.

The first theory of anxiety was that it was due to what he called dammed-up libido. And from that perspective, you break open the dam and then the anxiety disappears.

And that’s pretty much how Melanie Klein talked about working with anxiety, or working with patients: if they were anxious, a deep interpretation would make them feel better.

So that leads to her saying some, to me, outrageous things to patients, but it’s in the idea it’s going to make them feel better — breaking through the dam to get to the deep unconscious.

The second theory was, no, that really wasn’t the case. Anxiety is the ego’s response to a potential danger of something coming up that’s going to be threatening to the person.

So therefore you work very differently with that.

You don’t go straight to the danger, but talk about the fear of something that’s going to come up, and you work very differently.

I’ll just say that’s Model Two.

And the Kleinians still work with Model One. They are still working with, or thinking that the way to deal with anxiety is to break through the dam to make this deep interpretation.

Daniel T. Bourne:
And that goes back to what we said earlier about your emphasis on clarifying where your interpretation came from instead of just diving in and making deep interpretations.

And also the importance of working with the preconscious in the interpretive process, and not just going all the way down.

Fred Busch:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Role of Free Association

Daniel T. Bourne:
Maybe that leads into… You have written about and emphasized in some of your writings free association.

What do you think psychoanalysts misunderstand about free association?

Fred Busch:
At this particular point, most people don’t even use it. Or they use it to see what effect it’s having upon them rather than seeing what the patient’s thoughts are and their associations.

Now, sometimes I think you do, (or I end up), thinking more about what I’m feeling rather than what the patient is talking about.

Patients tell stories. You know? They tell stories.

And if you can get the story, and help the patient see what the story is that they’re telling, that is really helpful.

But sometimes the story gets all mixed up with language action.

So that the patient is talking and it seems perfectly reasonable, and you’re feeling like shit, or you’re feeling depressed, or whatever.

And then you have to sort it out to see if it’s because of what the patient is doing or because of something else.

And this is, I think I write about it in another chapter, about ethical countertransference.

Countertransference and Ethical Considerations 

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah.

Fred Busch:
Because there were two papers back in the fifties, one by Heinrich Racker, one by Paula Heimann, in which they were the first ones to talk about the analyst picking up something from the patient’s unconscious by the way that they’re talking.

So is it like an unconscious-to-unconscious?

And it’s interesting: in both papers they warn against just taking that as truth.

The analyst will have, you’ll pardon the expression, his own mishugash to deal with. And the analyst has to sort through which it is.

And it’s that element that often gets missed in some of the current literature about using one’s countertransference.

So ethical countertransference is, in my mind, based upon taking time to figure out what’s what.

Is it the patient’s unconscious, or is it my unconscious that’s gotten stirred up?

Daniel T. Bourne:
And you’ve seen perhaps a problematic trend in recent years where people take what is brought up in them as coming from the patient and only interpret it as the patient having brought this about.

Fred Busch:
Right. Right. Right.

It’s a big issue, and it sort of exploded.

And of course it’s a lot easier to think, “That’s coming from the patient,” rather than, “Something’s getting stirred up in myself that I’ve got to really think about.”

Dana Birksted-Breen, who was editor of the International Journal for a while, talked about this concept of “reverberation time” — that is, to allow oneself the time to let these things reverberate within you, to see what you can come up with, to try and figure out if it’s the patient, if it’s you, if it’s something else.

Exploring Transference in Therapy

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah. And I like that in the book you pointed out that not only, when it comes to transference in the therapeutic relationship, can we work with transference in the therapeutic relationship — which would be internal transference — we could also perhaps work with external transference.

Fred Busch:
Right, right, right, right, right.

Yeah, to me that is really important. 

Daniel T. Bourne:
Can you say more about that?

Fred Busch:
Because that’s where the patient’s affect is most of the time.

You know, “That son of a bitch who cut me off on the highway, and I know I’ve seen him before, and he’s coming again” … that kind of thing.

That’s where their affect is.

And for the analyst to say, “You must think this has to do with last session, where I started talking before you were — ” it takes the patient away from the immediacy of their affective involvement.

It may be that the analyst is correct, that it’s related to it. But how you get to that point, I think you have to work through the external transference first.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Have you… Do you know, I think his name was Patrick Casement?

Fred Busch:
Patrick Casement, yeah. It’s a name from the past.

I know his work from a while ago, but I can’t say I have any idea about what it’s about now.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Okay. There’s a… I’m trying to think of what the book is called right now, but I read a book by him, and he gave a lot of examples about working with the internal transference.

I think it’s probably more classical. But if someone came in and they started talking about their dentist and they were upset with their dentist, the automatic kind of intervention would be to translate that or interpret it as, “I did something as well. You’re upset with me.”

But what you’re saying is that kind of method takes them out of their experience.

If they really did have an experience with their dentist and it’s fresh, and even if it was activated by a prior experience they had with their analyst that they felt like they couldn’t verbalize, – that’s where the affect is.

And by bringing it back, by going straight into the unconscious, by bringing it back too quickly, it takes them out of that affective mode; which is what you need in order for true transformation to occur.

Fred Busch:
Yeah, exactly.

Daniel T. Bourne:
So you’re advocating for working with — And how would you maybe interpret their reaction to the dentist for what it is, or even work through that to the point where maybe, if it is about the analyst, they could then discover that?

Fred Busch:
Well, yeah. I mean, first one might have to deal with, you know, the dentist acted like a jerk or something like that.

But why it may have had a particularly strong reaction on your part was because of this and this from your background.

And just leave it there first, and then see if in some way there’s something that’s going on or happening in the transference that comes to your mind that you could bring in at a later point.

So, for example, the other day a patient said to me —

He said… (This was the first day back after I had been on vacation). He said to me, “You know, when you said to me, ‘Hang in there,’ I found that really offensive, because it was as if I needed some kind of support or bucking up during this time you were away.”

So I knew right away (or thought right away) something was going on.

And this is a guy who, especially in the area of sexuality, constantly needs to be shown that he’s really masculine enough.

He has a woman he’s involved with, and he’s always looking for signs as to whether he’s masculine enough.

At some point, as he was talking about this time with his girlfriend, all these questions came up. And I said:

“You know, we’ve talked a lot about this feeling that you have sometimes that you’re really not man enough and that you need a lot of reassurance. And yet, when I gave you some reassurance before the holiday, it seemed to really bug you. And I’m puzzled as to what that was about.”

And so there’s a long story about it, but that’s essentially how I might deal with it.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah. And that’s a good example, too, of working within the preconscious and not just making your own interpretation of what you think you might already know.

Something I’ve really found helpful, and I’ve been trying to do more of, is whereas maybe before… Kind of how you said, as you gave an example earlier, if someone was speaking and then they stopped, and then maybe they started speaking again, or maybe they changed the topic, or however:

Instead of just saying something like, “I wonder if you felt uncomfortable…” Pointing out, “You were talking just a moment about this, and then you stopped. Can you tell me what was going on?”

That’s helping them to think about how they think, think about their processing.

That’s been really helpful.

Fred Busch:
Mm. Mm-hmm. Good. Good.

Daniel, it’s my turn. Are you a therapist?

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yes, I am.

Fred Busch:
You are? Okay. All right.

And how far out are you, out of your training?

Daniel T. Bourne:
I am just about to complete my postdoc. I have a PsyD in clinical psychology.

Fred Busch:
Uh-huh. Where are you doing your postdoc?

Daniel T. Bourne:
At a private practice in Dayton, Ohio.

Fred Busch:
Uh-huh. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. Thank you.

Perspectives on the Unconscious

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah. I was going to ask you about the unconscious.

You quoted in here:

“The preponderance of analysts view the unconscious as a cauldron of irrationality and selfishness with barely represented forces striving for gratification.”

Would you agree with that? Is that how you view the unconscious?

Fred Busch:
Yes.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah, okay. I was curious.

I’ve read some Jungian literature…

Fred Busch:

I am sorry to hear that.

Daniel T. Bourne:

[ha ha ha], yeah, yeah. And there’s a quote from him where he says:

“For me the unconscious is not just a receptacle for all unclean spirits and other odious legacies from the dead past. It is in very truth the eternally living creative germinal layer in each of us.”

And I think, as an example, he would say, like, for that patient we were discussing earlier who might have some rage, but it’s buried — maybe they’re even so unconscious of their own rage that they don’t have words for it and can’t talk about it.

But let’s say that in their dreams at night, they often have very violent dreams full of fighting and war and bloodshed.

I think a more favorable interpretation of the unconscious would say something like: it’s trying to compensate or correct for the conscious attitude. It’s trying to make something aware. It’s trying, it’s striving to make it known that this is something that you’re feeling, and it’s trying to correct, trying to help adapt.

Is that type of view, in your opinion, justified? Is there room for that? Is that a misunderstanding? What would you say about that?

Fred Busch:
Well, I have a sort of mixed reaction to it.

Ernst Kris wrote a paper where he talked about artists and “regression in the service of the ego,” in terms of how artists can use stuff from their unconscious in their artwork without totally falling apart.

That brings the unconscious in, and they may not even be aware of it, but the ego is strong enough so that it can tolerate this regression to deal with this stuff.

In terms of the example, I… you know, it’s possible, but I just… it’s hard for me to say, or hard for me to answer.

I’ve never really seen an example of it, but I haven’t been looking at it in that particular way. I haven’t had that particular thought.

But let me just think about this for a second.

I mean, I might have said, I can see myself saying to a patient, “I think your dreams are telling you something about what we’ve been talking about that it’s been hard for you to accept just on your own.”

So I can see something like that happening.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah. With the way that you look at things, would you say that it’s a form of regression? Or how would you understand why they’re having these dreams of rage or violence, for someone who is, in conscious waking time, very unconscious of their anger?

Fred Busch:
Yes. It would be…

I could see, over a period of time, where one would be slowly helping the patient see some of the rage that they might feel, or anger that they might feel.

And if it’s done in a way that is not too threatening, and they can come to accept it a little bit, then it might be able to come out in their dreams more fully because it’s already begun to be worked through.

Daniel T. Bourne:
I see. Yeah.

Fred Busch:
It’s one way to think about it.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah. And it would also be that the rage and the anger in the dreams, that is perhaps not to use this word, but “merely” that is from the past.

That is something that you felt a long time ago, that maybe now that we’re working in analysis, it’s all being stirred up and you’re ready to feel some of that now, or something.

Fred Busch:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That’s a good way to put it.

Reflections on a Long Career

Daniel T. Bourne:
Perhaps a last question.

You’ve had a long career. You’ve written a lot of books and articles. And if you were to be starting off now in 2026 and you had another forty years, what question would you seek to better understand or answer? What would you want to focus on?

Fred Busch:
That’s a very good question.

I think I’d still be with what I’m dealing with here.

It seems to me, in my experience, questions keep on coming up and new ways of thinking about things.

For example, I recently read a quote from the poet John Keats. He wrote a letter to his brothers on something called negative capability, which isn’t anything like what the definition is, but what he described it as was the best way for a person to exist, is to be able to accept, without judgment, all ideas that may come to him or her.

And it seemed to me what he was describing was the ideal state of free association.

So I tried to work that into a paper about negative capability.

And so, you know, I keep on finding things to think about in this regard. I wouldn’t probably change it.

To me, it is the most interesting thing.

Daniel T. Bourne:
That’s a great place to be in your career.

Fred Busch:
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s all been worthwhile in some way.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Mm.

I don’t think I know this. How did you get into psychoanalysis originally?

Fred Busch:
Originally, Well —

When I went to graduate school, I went to a graduate school that was very research-oriented and totally against psychoanalysis.

But there was one teacher who taught a course on Freud, and so we read some Freud, and I was interested.

Then one of the guys from the graduate program went out to the University of Colorado Medical Center and did an internship there, and he raved about it.

So when I was ready for my internship, I went out there, and it was very psychoanalytically-oriented.

And to me, I was also looking for male role models. I wasn’t aware of it, but there were these guys out there who were very psychoanalytic, and people that I liked and enjoyed.

And so that’s how.

At that time, the American Psychoanalytic Association was not accepting PhDs for psychoanalytic training.

But I happened to find a program that — well, that’s a long story.

Daniel T. Bourne:
What was your PhD in?

Fred Busch:
University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Daniel T. Bourne:
And did you study psychology?

Fred Busch:
Yeah, yeah.

Daniel T. Bourne:
The American Psychoanalytic Association wasn’t accepting initiates that had a PhD in psychology?

Fred Busch:
No, no, no. That didn’t happen until, like, 1985.

But I found a program.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Because they were only accepting MDs at the time.

Fred Busch:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

I had to pay for it.

But yeah, things have changed dramatically since that time. There are probably more PhDs and social workers than MDs at this point in the American psychoanalytic world.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yeah.

Well, Dr. Fred Busch, it was a pleasure. Thank you for joining me today.

Fred Busch:
Also great talking with you.

You ask great questions, and I can see you’re working with this stuff in a way that you’re really trying to get it inside of you and figure it out, you know.

Daniel T. Bourne:
Yes, very much.

Fred Busch:

I’m very, very impressed with that.

Daniel T. Bourne:

Thank you.

Fred Busch:
Good talking with you.