Optimal Education Requires an Academic Context: Commentary on Wallerstein

Robert Wallerstein traces the history of psychoanalytic institutes from their beginnings in Berlin, along with the increasing criticism directed at their training programs and the suggestions for change that began soon after. He concludes that “even if all of this wider reform agenda were to be adopted, it would … address only part of our educational malaise, the part … stemming from the authoritarian power of the training analyst. What would not be addressed at all is another grave set of issues, those deriving from the peculiar isolation of psychoanalysis, and its educational structure, from other disciplines that study human functioning. This isolation, perhaps forced on us at the beginning, has increasingly limited us over our century of growth.” His refocusing of the issue is fundamental. However troubled the social psychology of the educational process might be, the organizational structure of institutes and their relationship to the outer world is a distinct and, I would add, a more essential problem.

This shifts the focus from the history of independent institutes to the relationship, actual and potential, between psychoanalysis and universities. The two were almost completely separated in Freud's Europe, and then enjoyed an only partial rapprochement in psychiatry departments and medical schools, first in the United States and then in postwar Europe. For Wallerstein this was a first step in the right direction, but not a wholly successful one, as “formal psychoanalytic research, though proclaimed as a prime beneficiary of the embedding of psychoanalytic training in the medical school and university,