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The Trainings of the Psychoanalyst was an extremely challenging book to review. Its author, Annie Tardits, a French Lacanian psychoanalyst, first published the book in French in 2000. The English edition, published by Karnac Books last year, was translated by Marc du Ry, a London psychoanalyst connected to The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research Library (CFAR). This group has among its goals the propagation of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the UK, as well as the translation of classic Lacanian texts into English.
At 164 pages, I expected this to be a fairly quick and easy read, even for someone not well versed in Lacanian theory. But either the author's writing style or the translator's has managed to produce a text as enigmatic and at times impenetrable as Lacan's lectures. In addition, the book is rife with grammatical, syntactical, and metaphorical errors. Despite all this, Tardits's conviction regarding the benefits of Lacan's training model compelled me to read and reread the text, as well as to consult other sources on Lacanian theory and training. If the author's intent was to stimulate further in-depth inquiry into Lacan's training model, she has succeeded. If, however, her intent was to write an unbiased and comprehensive text describing Lacan's thinking regarding the creation of a psychoanalyst, she has not. In the very brief introduction, Tardits focuses on Lacan's distinction between psychoanalytic training and the training of an individual analyst. Also in the introduction, Lacan's controversial notion of the “pass” makes its first appearance. We will return to this in detail later.
The first of the book's six chapters is titled “The First Analysts.” Under the subhead “A Testimony,” Tardits writes about Lou Andreas-Salomé, a layperson who without formal training became an analyst. Tardits appears to conclude that because of this lack of formal training, analysis became not only Andreas-Salome's profession but, as she wrote, “that by which my life