My Psychoanalytic Story: with Nikky Sternhell

Niamh: Tell us your name, where you’re based and a bit about your professional background.

Nikky: I’m Nikky Sternhell. I’m a psychodynamic counsellor, I trained at Birkbeck, and I’ve been a trustee of the BPC for the last five years. I retired when I moved to the West Coast of Scotland. When I was working I had a practice in Oxfordshire.

Niamh: Let’s start at the beginning of your psychoanalytic career. Did you always have an interest in the area? Did you always know that’s where you wanted to end up professionally?

Nikky: Well, I used to make jokes that it was part of my heritage, because my father was born and raised in Vienna, and he actually knew Freud. They lived in the same neighbourhood. I think my father had a schoolmate whose father was a doctor and one of Freud’s colleagues. But I don’t think I ever actually heard anything about Freud from my father.

I did, however, start with Freud. I read Freud’s ‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ when I was thirteen, more or less by chance. I was staying with my German grandmother, and she said there was box of books in English under the bed if I could find something I would like to read. Sure enough, the Freud book was one of them. I’m not convinced I understood it all, but I did understand quite a lot of it, and I was absolutely fascinated by the idea that there was an unconscious. I think from reading that I knew I wanted to be a psychoanalyst.

Although it didn’t work out at all like that because I didn’t really know how to do that. I thought that the way to get into that career was to study medicine, then to study psychiatry, and then to move from there into psychoanalytic thinking. That wasn’t the only way to do it but that was all I knew about at the time. I was the only girl in my class doing science subjects so the girls’ careers adviser didn’t know anything about a career in medicine and the boys’ career careers adviser said: “Well I can’t talk to you, you’re a girl.”

So, I didn’t get careers advice, but I did realise somewhere before I made any irreversible step that studying medicine wasn’t what I wanted to do. I thought about studying psychology, but that’s not what I wanted to do either and then I put the whole idea aside.

So, I didn’t come back to psychoanalysis until much, much later. In fact, I began my training when I was around 50, and I’ve had couple of different careers first. I had a career in computing and I had a career in catering. I ran my own restaurant for a while, then I went back to computing until around the year 2000, after that computing work began to dry up. An awful lot of work, coming up to the year 2000, went into ensuring that the Y2K bug never happened, but after that there wasn’t quite so much to do. So, I packed up my computer job but wasn’t ready to retire. That’s when I decided to go back and think about psychoanalysis again. At that stage I didn’t want to do a hugely long training and I discovered the existence of a psychodynamic counselling course at Birkbeck and that’s what I did. So, it was a pretty late start. Since then, I’ve had a career stretching for something like 20 years.

Niamh: I’d love to hear more about what it was like to begin training at 50. Did your age present any barriers for you or did everything come quite naturally?

Nikky: Well, I think both things are true, it was incredibly challenging. I mean, thinking back to my thirteen-year-old self who wanted to be a psychoanalyst, I think what I really wanted was my own analysis. Of course, that would have been a very difficult thing to articulate and when I did start training it was very important to me that part of the training was to have my own personal therapy. I think that that’s quite likely to be true, whether consciously or not consciously, for most people who go into psychoanalysis. I did way more than the minimum training requirement which was once a week therapy, and gradually built up to five times a week analysis for quite a number of years, extending after my training and that was very hard, that was very challenging. It was also incredibly worthwhile.

The more academic side of the course came more naturally. I mean, I loved it, having started way back reading Freud. I didn’t find the reading or even applying the ideas to the work particularly difficult. The challenge was always the personal stuff, the more internal stuff, I think.

Niamh: I suppose you’re coming from a unique position in comparison to your peers at that point then, being older and receiving considerably more analysis. Did that uniqueness feel like a strength?

Nikky: Absolutely, although a few of my peers were of similar age. The more analysis, yes, definitely. I appreciate that the training is quite expensive and it often feels very difficult for people to have more therapy above the requirements, but to me that was essential. And as far as my career goes, I found it terrifically important.

I think the Birkbeck training is fairly unusual in that it incorporates a large amount of organisational studies. So, not only looking at individual clients, patients and their unconscious, but also thinking about the unconscious workings of an organisation and I found that fascinating. I think, having had a long career, my computing career for instance, in office life and the business world, something spoke to me about that. Learning about ideas of what goes on within organisations and why, I just loved it. So, I think that my last career, from practising as a counsellor to joining the BPC board was a progression. I think I ended up where I wanted to be. The organisational side of things can be more different, more unusual, less expected.

Niamh: Is there a specific moment that comes to mind, in your psychoanalytic career, where you began to feel confident about your expertise? Or was it more a constant learning process for you?

Nikky: I think that it’s constant learning, but I do think that there’s a point where it’s possible to feel confident enough to not be totally at sea, and I think what helped a lot with that was good supervision.

Now, I’m not sure if things are still as they were, but when I qualified, there was an expectation, it was a totally normal thing, that you would work unpaid for quite a long time before you could consider getting paid work. If you applied for a paid job, there were 200 applications for every job. I wouldn’t like to say how many years it was, but there were several years where I was working and seeing a number of patients without being paid for it. So, it was a leap of confidence in a way to start up a private practice and actually earn some money doing it. I went through a process of trying to work out how I would do that and what I would need to do that. My analysis was still going on at that time and I got a lot of help from that. I also got help from good individual and quite frequent supervision from a well-qualified and experienced psychoanalyst. That made a difference because I could observe the point at which the supervision sessions stopped being: “Oh no, I probably got all this wrong. She’s going to say I shouldn’t have said that or I should have done that,” to the supervision sessions becoming a discussion between colleagues.

Gradually I came to feel, not that I knew exactly what I was doing or that it was a breeze, because it never was like that, but at least I knew that what I was doing was reasonable. I didn’t help everybody that I saw, but I’d like to think that for some people, I was able to help some of the time, and perhaps some people even more of the time. It’s very difficult to know and I think that’s one of the things about this work: you end the work but you don’t find out what happens next. Although, it has to be that way, but that’s a pity, really.

Niamh: Let’s move onto your organisational work and specifically your work as a Board member for the BPC. Could you talk me through your journey to taking up the position?

Nikky: Well, it was quite a strange journey because when I was practising as a counsellor, I belonged to the professional body that my training was accredited with, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). So naturally, I went on to do my BACP accreditation. Over time, there were some things about being with BACP that I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with. The BACP is a professional body for counsellors of many different modalities, which has some advantages but at that time I felt there was a definite downer on psychoanalytic thinking. There were some things that happened that I felt very uncomfortable with. So, I wanted to join the BPC as a professional body, but there was no means to do that because you can only join the BPC as a member of a Member Institution (MI) and the Birkbeck Counselling Association (BCA) – the graduate body for the Birkbeck Psychodynamic Counselling training – wasn’t an MI at that time. Then I had a thought:

“Well, there’s one way I could do that. Could we get the Birkbeck training and the BCA accredited with the BPC?” And that’s a much longer story, but that is what happened. So that was my project, I didn’t do it single-handedly, but it happened.

So, I was very pleased to be able to join the BPC and for a while I was the Council representative. I’ve always liked organisational roles like that. I do take it seriously, it’s very important to me, the BPC is very important to me. We have here an organisation that totally understands psychoanalytic work and I wanted to be part of that.

So, when vacancies on the board came up and somebody suggested it to me, my first thought was that I couldn’t do it or commit the time, but ultimately I knew it was something I wanted to do and I chose to get involved. That actually feels quite important to me because it’s opened something up for other people who have done my training. That’s perhaps one of my biggest achievements – being able to do that – and I also got what I’d initially wanted from the whole thing, to join the BPC as a registrant.

Niamh: Tell me a bit more about your experience of being on the BPC board, how has it made you think about the profession you’re in?

Nikki: Well, I do enjoy being on the board and I enjoy being with, talking to and listening to the other board members. It’s quite an interesting position. I’m a psychodynamic counsellor and there was a time, not so very long ago, when psychodynamic counsellors would not have been part of the BPC. That was before my time. The integration of psychodynamic counsellors happened in the BPC during something called ‘The Expansion Project’, which I think can sound quite patronising. However, I’ve not felt anything other than welcomed by the BPC. I feel able to put my opinions forward and for them to be considered just as valid as anybody else’s. Although, within the profession as a whole, from some of the membership, there is a looking down on psychodynamic psychotherapists and psychodynamic counsellors. So, I think there’s a challenge there that will have to be negotiated in the future.

Niamh: Fast forwarding to the present, coming into retirement, do you feel like you’re still learning? Do you feel happy with where you’ve ended up and can you think of any advice or support you received over the years that you wish you’d known at the beginning?

Nikky: Most of it, you pick up as you go from supervision, from your own therapy and from what you read. I have this wonderful book published in the 90s, called ‘How to Survive as a Psychotherapist’ by Nina Coltart. She says somewhere right at the beginning, one very bold sentence: “it takes 10 years to become a psychotherapist”, and she means post-qualification. I’ve always thought that was absolutely true. I mean, not the exact number of years, but yeah, we’re looking at that kind of time frame. So, I think that that would be useful to know at the beginning.

Somebody else said to me quite recently something I wish I’d understood earlier, which was that you have to invest in your career. So, I think that requires a certain amount of commitment, and you could look at that in more than one way. You can look at that financially, in paying for your training, paying for your therapy, and it might be worth investing a bit more to pay for a bit more therapy and supervision. You also have to put something of yourself in there rather than just coast along and see how it goes. You have to put lots of things in there, and some of those are concrete and practical things as well as the emotional. So, I don’t think I really appreciated that.

You’ve also just got to accept that you’ll learn as you go. During my time as a student at Birkbeck, I did my placement in an NHS hospital psychotherapy department, I was quite worried then about the idea that the patients coming in for psychotherapy were getting me, a trainee. Of course, that meant I was going to make mistakes and I did, but it just had to happen like that. You can’t even say it’s unfair to the patients as they got double the attention from myself and my supervisor. But you’ve got to start at the beginning, and you’ve got to come through it and you’ve got to learn. There is no other way to learn this than by doing it.