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If, as Freud suggested, psychoanalysis is one of the “impossible professions,” along with education and government, then teaching and learning clinical psychoanalysis are doubly, and, given the institutional and organizational challenges, triply, impossible. Embarking on a psychoanalytic education can be a daunting endeavor for students and teachers alike.
Psychoanalytic education has always been a work in progress, with an optimistic hope of continued improvement, but no ideal method in sight. Our educational models began as personal mentorships, moved on to guild apprenticeships, and then, in 1920, to formal educational standardization that sought to define the criteria and boundaries of the profession. Since then, formal structured training institutions have dominated our field—the Eitingon model becoming the standard for much of an organized and increasingly professionalized psychoanalysis.
The pedagogy of the Eitingon and French models—the two current paradigms—places most of the burden (the training analysis aside) on supervision as the transmitter of psychoanalytic knowledge and skill. The didactic curriculum, once the heart of psychoanalytic teaching, has devolved into an undervalued role as a mode of learning about analytic process, therapeutic change, and the analyst's participation. Generally, the lived, personalized experience of the candidate is treated delicately in supervision, and from a safe distance in most process courses.
This tradition has conspired to underutilize writing as an effective mode of learning. Case summaries have often been an administrative task, and rarely exploited as an educational opportunity. The “talking cure” has largely been taught by the “talking training.”
Writing is an act of creativity and discovery. Writers implore the participation of the Muse to gain access to their imaginative, inner world