The Clinical Conference in Teaching and Learning the Psychoanalytic Process

An important body of psychoanalytic understanding which must be acquired by a candidate during his training is an integrated and workable clinical and theoretical conceptualization of the psychoanalytic process and of his role in it. Although this subject is touched upon in fragmentary fashion in a number of different educational experiences in the usual psychoanalytic curriculum, insufficient attention has at times been given to the problem of helping the candidate synthesize these fragmentary experiences.

The personal analysis is indispensable in helping the candidate develop himself as a psychoanalytic instrument and in preparing him for his role in the psychoanalytic process, but it should not be considered as a means of acquiring a conceptual awareness of the analytic process itself. Although the candidate in a successful personal analysis acquires an emotional awareness of the progressive process from the analysand's point of view, and although this form of learning equips him to empathically understand the role of the patient in later clinical work, an emphasis on the cognitive and conceptual elements of his own analysis frequently serves the function of resistance.

Seminars on psychoanalytic technique frequently offer general principles or theoretical ideas, but application to the clinical situation and to the sequential unfolding and development of an analytic process usually cannot be documented in this type of course. Theoretical seminars on metapsychology likewise may touch on this subject, but usually from an abstract and highly conceptualized point of view, which is frequently at some distance from the clinical phenomenology and data from which the conceptualizations are extrapolated.