The Selection of Candidates for Psychoanalytic Training: On the Use of Interviews and Psychological Tests1

It is quite obvious that psychoanalysts are going to be selected for psychoanalytic training by methods that rely more or less heavily on interviewing. The interview is the most widely used technique in all kinds of personnel selection, and certainly is the mainstay of most psychoanalytic Education Committees. No matter what evidence might turn up that interviewing was unreliable, deceptive, or what not, most of us would still probably insist on interviewing a prospective secretary before hiring her. Which is to say that this is partly a rational but also partly a nonrational matter; it is deeply entrenched in tradition and habit, and our job therefore is to make the best of it.

Let us approach the task of improving the interview by considering some of the weak points of the interviewing in the selection project carried out at the Menninger School of Psychiatry. Perhaps if we get a better understanding of the results obtained in our research, we may be able to see how to do better.

To begin with, it cannot easily be maintained that the results were no better because we did not have good men to do the interviewing.4 The