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What we need… is a new orientation of our training system which must aim less at establishing a new and firm super-ego but more at enabling the candidate to free himself and to build up a strong ego which shall be both critical and liberal at the same time (Balint, 1948, p. 170)
In his edited book, Power games: Influence, persuasion, and indoctrination in psychotherapy training, Richard Raubolt provides the reader with a window to therapists' subjectivity through their emotionally charged interactions in different training programs. The book is organized into three sections: Personal Reflections, Theoretical and Technical Considerations, and Supervisory Alternatives.
Charles B. Strozier focuses on two stories in his Introduction. First, he describes Robert Jay Lifton's personal experience at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute in the late 1950s. Strozier quotes the many questions Lifton raised. One of the questions is relating to the structural problem of institutes that requires many roles that trainees (patient, student, and candidate) as well as analysts (teacher, supervisor) carry. The second story is Strozier's experience in the late 1970s at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis in which two camps, the Freudian and Kohutian, divided the institute. Strozier, who moved to Kohut's camp, acknowledges that even though the group was cultic in many ways he appreciated the “level-headed and professional” Kohut. Strozier emphasizes the creativity and hope that psychoanalysis can generate.
In chapter 1, Annette Richard describes her professional journey, focusing on her traumatic experience in Center for Feeling Therapy in Los Angeles, a training that led to “indoctrination, fanaticism, and abuse of power.” Her struggle to reveal the painful experience eventually resulted in disclosing parts of her personal life that affected her professional choices and the breakdown she had suffered. Theoretical arguments accompa