Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training

Training is an issue that has never been settled from a theoretical perspective, even by Freud, and it has developed gradually throughout the history of the movement more as a political than a scientific matter. Over time, the concept of analysis and analytical function has become more and more coherently linked to the suspension of judgment and free association methods. On the subject of training, however, which increasingly represents the psychoanalyst's enactment within the social field, the necessity has arisen to express judgment and therefore to institutionalize a hierarchy of values, competencies and rules which are only apparently connected with the scientific criteria of the discipline, so as to reach an adequate degree of social consensus.

It is a knotty issue which is still very difficult to clarify and I think that possible solutions may be found only through concerted group effort. In my opinion, it must be borne in mind that each psychoanalyst today, regardless of how he has been trained, has in any event acquired a strong, deep, automatic and unconscious bond towards his Institution which may be greater than that felt towards psychoanalytic theory.

For us psychoanalysts, being part of the institution is an important defence; it represents a point of reference and an anchor as we venture into the search for yet another sense, and therefore it ends up representing perhaps the most stable and containing aspect of psychoanalysis itself, while the theory and its course have a fluidity that is connected to the mobility of the experience. Therefore, each of us is always the bearer of a good deal of conservatism which puts up resistance to innovation or to new approaches to the issue of training which do not also have reassuring margins of observance. So, starting from a distance, I shall begin by asking a question which may be of use in initiating debate on the topic.

With hindsight, is it possible in the field of psychoanalysis to have a scientific theory of t