What helps prepare a psychoanalyst for this? Everything! Psychoanalysis lives in a great intellectual neighborhood, with stimulating interactions with many nearby disciplines. Anything you’ve learned about people in an English course, in history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry applies. So does neuroscience, which has a greatly increasing exchange with psychoanalysis. With its attention to drives and biology, psychoanalysis connects with the natural sciences; with its focus on interpersonal relationships, it engages with the social sciences; and with its emphasis on individual subjectivity, it is squarely in the humanities.
If your interests are broad, if you are someone who was drawn to psychiatry because you really want to know what makes people tick, you may well find a career in psychoanalysis to be remarkably fulfilling.
Dr Blum is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private in Philadelphia. He also serves as a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia.