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Our lives are regulated and determined by aggregating and disgregating forces, and the same can be said of institutions, in respect of which these forces may be considered as centripetal and centrifugal forces. An equilibrium between them is fundamental to their working well, as otherwise they may represent a danger for the survival of the institutions themselves: the former leads them to implode, and the latter to explode.
An institution's bylaws are the expression of a balance between these forces; a balance which is possible at a given time, but whose characteristics and evolution are at the same time as inevitable as they are necessary to ensure that it does not veer towards the destructive extremities of the continuum that they describe. The manner in which psychoanalytical societies manage members' training is part of the equilibrium which characterizes that body's organization at a given time. I will attempt to evoke some elements of the history of the origins of the Eitingon model, both in terms of its historical origins and as the story of the events surrounding its origins, and therefore, inevitably, of the ideal.
Over a period of a few short years the Eitingon model, which grew out of the experience of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic founded by Max Eitingon, Ernst Simmel1 and Karl Abraham,2 became the regulatory point of reference and was for a long time the only training method recognized by the IPA for the training of their members (three training models have recently been adopted).3