Жизнь других
The analyst may be completely absorbed in his work with his patients, which at first glance would seem a good thing. His own private life takes a back seat to the problems and difficulties of his patients. But a point may be reached where the patients might actually live for the analyst, so to speak, where they are expected to fill the gap left by the analyst's own loss of contact with warm, dynamic life. The analyst no longer has his own friends; his patients' friendships and enmities are as his own. The analyst's sex life may be stunted; his patients' sexual problems provide a substitute. Having chosen such a profession, he is barred from attaining a powerful political position; his investment of energy is all the greater in the power struggles of a politician-patient. In this way, the analyst gradually ceases to lead a vital life and contends himself with the lives of his patients.
First of all, this kind of situation is dangerous for the analyst himself. His own psychic development comes to a standstill. Even in his non-professional life, he can talk of nothing but his patients and their problems. He is no longer able to laugh and hate, to invest himself in life, to struggle, to win and lose. His own affective life becomes a surrogate. Acting thus as a quack who draws his sustenance from the lives of his patients, the analyst may seem momentarily to flourish psychically. But in reality he loses his own vitality and creative originality. The advantage of such vicarious living, of course, is that the analyst is also spared any genuine suffering. In a sense, this function, too, is exercised for him by others.
Such an analyst is also harmful to his own patients. They, too, cease to live genuine lives and instead live only in relation to the analyst experiencing things primarily in order to tell them to him. Love, for instance, becomes not an experience in itself, but something the "how and why" of which can be told to the analyst. The existential beauty of life enriches not the patient, but the analyst. Every life may be regarded as a work of art. But in this case the patient no longer creates his life in order to enjoy it himself, but in order that the analyst need not create his work of art, need not invest himself, and instead can take his pleasure in the works of the patient.
It is exceedingly difficult to pin down this phenomenon of vicarious living. In many cases, an analyst who still enjoys and suffers in his own dynamic life has a guilty conscience, feeling that he should realy be more interested in his patients. But actually, in the long run, only an analyst who is passionately engaged in his own life can help his patients to find theirs. In this sense it is true, as Jung says, that an analyst can only give to his patients that which he has himself.
Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, Power in the Helping Professions