Splendid Isolation

Splendid isolation is how Freud described, rationalized really, his remoteness from the intellectual currents surrounding his working out a systematic understanding of unconscious mental life. One can, along with Freud, argue that his isolation nurtured his creativity. However, a more careful reading reveals his steady reach for help, encouragement, and inspiration from a continuously expanding circle of friends and colleagues. Nonetheless, this spirit of isolation has remained tightly bound to the unsavory nature of our interests and our expectation of challenge, criticism, and unwanted impingement. It has led, along with cultural and socioeconomic factors, to our current isolation from educational institutions, science and research, kindred scholars in the academy, and even from one another, the last frequently rationalized as pluralism. I would like to consider briefly each of these four domains from which we are somewhat estranged, in relation to JAPA's mission and new initiatives.

JAPA 52/3 inaugurated our psychoanalytic education section. There are major problems in our training programs that are at least in part traceable to our decision to isolate psychoanalytic education from university life. Our institutes, with few exceptions, are free-standing, without connection to other institutions of higher learning. We have attempted to fit our training of students into a private practice model, which has led to an enormous financial burden for trainees as practice conditions have changed. By cutting ourselves off from universities, we have tended toward a narrow clinical training model rather than a more encompassing educational perspective. Likewise, we have neglected the development of competent psychoanalytic educators. There is no comprehensive track for becoming an analyst, a situation that has rendered our training supplemental to other professional preparation, in the past principally medical and psychiatric, although less so now. As a result, the enormous re