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This panel clearly showed the impact of the impressive changes which have taken place in the field of psychoanalytic teaching and training within recent decades in this country, and especially since the end of World War II. These changes reflect the growing influence of psychoanalysis on psychiatry and medical sciences in general, and thereby on young physicians who wish to enter the field of psychiatry. The number of psychoanalytic institutes as well as the number of students in this field has multiplied, so that clearer and more organized thinking about the essentials of psychoanalytic training and the practical implementation of such training has become a necessity. The training in psychoanalysis is clearly changing, for better or worse, from an individual apprenticeship type to a more formalized academic and institutional type of education. This transition, as well as the difficulties inherent in any kind of attempt to impart psychoanalytic understanding and skills to variously motivated students, has created, in all psychoanalytic institutes, a growing need for re-evaluation and reformulation of teaching techniques and of the basic curriculum. The widening scope of psychoanalysis as a treatment method has only increased the problems and perplexities with which all psychoanalytic training facilities are confronted today.
Representatives of most of the training facilities were invited to participate in the discussions which in part centered around a paper by Richard L. Frank. The discussion dealt in part with teaching and curriculum problems encountered in various training institutions. As will be seen, the contributions to this panel can thus be roughly divided, on the one hand, into more general considerations of teaching and training philosophy and of problems in the basic training program,