Analytic work is loved and hated. Both attitudes deserve scrutiny, but the analyst's hatred of analysis, which transcends countertransference responses to individual patients, represents an impediment to gratifying analytic work whose recognition and conceptualization has been resisted. The author suggests that antipathy among analysts toward analysis and the analytic situation is normative and expectable, yet commonly experienced as shameful. He speculates that it is sometimes disavowed and projected. Training institutes might inadvertently foster this sense of shame rather than promote its working through. The recognition that analytic identity functions as both a loving and a persecutory internal object has implications for psychoanalytic education and practice.
