My journey into psychoanalysis did not commence with the didactic absorption of theories but unfolded through a deeply personal evolution, an experiential assimilation that transformed my way of being and perceiving. As I traversed the chasms of self-discovery and professional development, I chanced upon a psychoanalytic institute in India, a country where the psychoanalytic community is still emerging amidst a rich tapestry of cultural and social dynamics, which facilitated my becoming – not merely as a therapist but, more fundamentally, a person who thinks psychoanalytically.

This paper aims to weave together the tapestry of my experiential journey with the conceptual threads of Kleinian theory. I will explore how the oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions has been emblematic of my own internal struggles and triumphs as a candidate in a psychoanalytic institute. This duality mirrors the inevitable anxieties and the reparative aspirations I faced while constructing a home within the institution and the broader psychoanalytic community.

Moreover, I plan to highlight how this internal Kleinian process paralleled the clinical encounters with patients, where the tumult and the tranquility of their psychic lives demanded an empathic attunement that only a lived-through psychoanalytic perspective within a certain cultural and social context could afford. The feeling of belonging within the institute was not a peripheral experience but a central one that informs my clinical work.

The presentation will also have a clinical vignette that exemplifies the application of this internalized psychoanalytic lens and will delve into the role of institution as a scaffold that has supported the integration into the psychoanalytic milieu against the backdrop of India’s evolving psychoanalytic landscape. It is through this lens that I could build my relational home within the institute and the broader field, a home that is both a sanctuary and a site of ceaseless becoming.

The suggested contribution is an autotheoretical piece on autotheory and how it can be employed as a psychosocial concept and method for the exploration of self-formation in-between the psychic and sociopolitical spheres. I reflect on my personal experience related to the reception of my published fiction as a disguised autobiography that offers itself (myself) to wild analysis interpretations; to do so, I draw upon psychoanalytic theory and feminist metaphysics. I investigate whether it is important to make a differentiation between truth and fiction, memory and fantasy, and whether the disruption of such separation could offer a new formative psychosocial paradigm of female subjectivity.

Autotheory is a genre of writing that has recently been brought into prominence in feminist life-writing but also psychoanalytic theory. It entwines autobiographical narration with philosophy and critical theory; it engages self-narrativisation with the conceptual questioning of the formation of ‘the self’. My hypothesis is that autotheory is not merely a genre; transposing the lived experience of everyday life into the psycho-philosophical examination of subjectivity, it offers a psychosocial medium and tool to study the wider psychic and sociopolitical consequences in and for self-formation.