What are we Doing and Why?

In this Education Section, we continue our serious self-scrutiny of psychoanalytic education. With the papers in this issue, the necessary, if uncomfortable, examination of our best intentions and efforts focuses on current expressions of the “treat/teach” dilemma. Hence my title: “What are we doing and why”

Supervision (more about supervision in subsequent sections) stands closest to the ancient professional guild apprenticeship tradition, a tradition that has seen clinical practice as the predominant goal, and therefore views the other two legs of our tripartite structure—training analysis and didactic education—as in many ways necessary and justified, but as untouchable in the first instance and secondary in the latter. The training analysis and the didactic curriculum are the subjects of this section. While differing in their approaches, the two papers demand that we consider what we aim to achieve as psychoanalytic educators and how we know if we are succeeding.

Training analysis, “the cornerstone of psychoanalytic training,” has long been considered sacrosanct and almost mythical in its educational/ therapeutic purposes, essential for becoming an analyst but untested as to its effectiveness in achieving its aims. Beginning with a revisiting of Freud's original prescription of a personal analysis in his apprenticeship vision of psychoanalytic education, Cabaniss and Bosworth, in “The Aim of the Training Analysis,” take us through the history of our field's thinking on the goals of the training analysis: the tensions, ideals, and issues that have occupied our educators for nearly a century. Their paper is a sober, humbling, and, at times almost amusing reminder of where we have been-our idealism and grand expectations-and where we need to go. The authors end with a critique and an appeal for a systematic study of the training analysis so that we can clarify how our aims can reciprocally affect our technique, and ultimately develop methods of assessing how effectiv