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The Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST) is a committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association, part of its Board on Professional Standards. It was established some fifty years ago to provide an avenue for those (including psychologists) who were not physicians to obtain psychoanalytic training; among the eminent analysts who obtained “waivers” for full clinical training are Roy Schafer and Erik Erikson. Today its primary purpose is to oversee the training of academics and any other non-mental health professionals who wish to become practicing psychoanalysts, though it also offers a track called “Research Associate,” which provides an opportunity to undergo all aspects of clinical training but the actual work with patients.
It is important to note that the CORST committee grants waivers to one of the institutes of the American for the training of an interested individual—that is, the Institute obtains the waiver, not the prospective analyst. This means that the first step in the training of an academic candidate is the commitment of a local institute to that candidate's ambition to become a psychoanalyst. In the contemporary psychoanalytic scene, this committee, which had previously been a “gatekeeper” designed to winnow out applicants who sought training, now actively seeks to foster an interest in the practice of psychoanalysis among responsive academics. The committee recognizes that many scholars may desire to augment, intensify, or discover the roots of their psychoanalytic quest within clinical contexts. Without diminishing the interest and utility of psychoanalytic theory as it is employed to interpret culture and society in all its dimensions, it can still be emphasized that psychoanalysis is founded in clinical practice as well as in literary and cultural