The Consultation Service

This morning's main events are the reports you will hear from Drs. Astley and Kohut concerning the studies undertaken by the Conferences on Curriculum, and I should like to take advantage of this occasion to congratulate them and their colleagues in the three Conferences on their progress in formulating and mutually discussing and clarifying the problems in that particular field of psychoanalytic education. This presentation of the work of the Consultation Service will furnish the background for these coming reports. I shall not speak of the expanding work of the whole educational program but of the part with which I am most familiar, namely, the work and program of the consultants and of our service.

When Helen Ross and I were hired in 1959 as consultants, the general idea was that knowledge and experience acquired through three years' work on the Survey might somehow he put to work directly and concretely to advance psychoanalytic education. We had accumulated shelves of loose-leaf ring books, boxes, and filing cases bulging with documents of all sorts: records of interviews with faculty members, students, graduates, administrative staff; records of audits of classes and supervisory hours; extensive notes of observation in all fields of psychoanalytic education. We had correspondence and notes of consultations with experts outside of the narrower field. We had gathered syllabi, brochures, reports of institutes and committees, all sorts of records from the institute offices, and answers to the several questionnaires we had sent out to faculty and students. There was instructive material in these records, not all of it utilized for our reports, that suggested the possibility of further use. One of our knowledgeable colleagues, visiting us, said that we had enough to keep a whole department of graduate students busy. But a research factory was not precisely what we and our colleagues of the Planning Committee had in mind. More functionally, the idea seemed t