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Selection of candidates for psychoanalytic training is a constant task for our training facilities and a constant challenge. Each year decisions are made to accept some applicants and to reject others. Much time and effort is spent on coming to these decisions and since the training program itself is long and costly, mistakes become expensive for all concerned.
To avoid mistakes and their consequent waste would be reason enough to warrant close scrutiny of the problems inherent in selection. But there is another equally cogent reason, namely, to arrive, if possible, at criteria for selection which go beyond the impressionistic "sizing-up" so commonly used as a basis for accepting or rejecting an applicant. We need to define in more precise and more communicable terms our reasons for selection decisions. Systematic studies of the problems which the task of selection presents and of the procedures used to study them need to be undertaken.
The process of selection is a process of prediction. Each selection choice is one which makes a prediction regarding the eventual success of the applicant as an analyst. This is a judgment that predicts success or failure in a particular task. A systematic study of the process of making such predictions requires a knowledge of what the particular task demands. A necessary step in this direction is an analysis of the activity for which success or failure is being predicted. In the language of the many investigators making predictive studies (8), (9), (17), it is called a job analysis.
This paper presents an attempt at a job analysis. It tries to answer the question what are we selecting for. By examining the