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In recent times, new voices have expressed a growing concern with serious problems in psychoanalytic education. A sharp critique is evolving regarding the rigidity and authoritarianism prevalent in psychoanalytic institutes, their tendency to induce a subservient conventionalism and a combination of idealization of some preferred teachers, local idols, or psychoanalytic orientation, while ignoring or denigrating others. The contemporary development of alternative theoretical psychoanalytic formulations and technical approaches stands in contrast, for those authors, to the prevalent routine transmission of traditional sources of information, and the unwarranted lack of excitement of the intellectual life of psychoanalytic institutions. A central issue of these critiques is the inordinate power vested in the training analysis system, and the organizational distortions arising from that dysfunctional power distribution. Reeger has expressed that critique from a Norwegian experience, Garza-Guerrero from a Mexican background, and Meyer from a Brazilian perspective. Now we have this interesting text from Emanuel Berman, presenting the experience of the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society in dealing with some of these important concerns, from the perspective of the relational school of psychoanalysis.
A central thesis of Berman's book is that the present problems of psychoanalytic education derive from an ideological conflict that runs throughout the entire history of psychoanalytic institutions. This conflict was expressed first in the tensions between Freud and Ferenczi, and then replicated, in a later generation, by the corresponding dialectic