Psychoanalytic Education Needs to Change: What's Feasible? Introduction to Wallerstein

We analysts are a rather self-reflective lot. In our clinical work, we are always asking ourselves about the meanings of who we are and what we do. And we try to change to improve our understanding and our skill. This inward preoccupation is a significant source of our strengths, and of our weaknesses. Self-reflection is clearly an essential element in our therapeutic process, and of our intellectual critique of the theories that undergird the clinical situation. However, as educators, we are not as clear in our vision and in our ability to make the changes needed to sustain our educational structure. Freud considered psychoanalysis one of the “impossible professions,” along with education and government. Have we created the “trifecta” of impossibilities in our efforts to conduct analyses, and to create and govern psychoanalytic education and training? Few of us are actually trained as teachers. Time and experience have finally disabused us of the fantasy that being an analyst means we can understand and explain everything. The classroom is not the consulting room. We recognize this in the ways we have problematically conflated aspects of teaching and treating. Who can help us see our limitations more clearly? Increasingly, our candidates are holding up the mirror to us in our educational roles. And what should we be doing to educate ourselves as educators, and to improve the knowledge base of our field? With whom should we be talking about what we know and how effectively we teach? And let's never forget the real-world problems of time and money.

As you will read in Robert Wallerstein's comprehensive critical history of psychoanalytic institutes, and in the commentaries by Robert