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Nor would I say that our institutes are of no value. They do fulfil their purpose: they turn out … a remarkable percentage of competent analysts; but… the training that is conducted in our professional schools distorts some of the most valuable features of psychoanalysis and hinders its development as a science and as a tool by means of which to change behavior.
The history of attempts to improve the education of psychoanalysts schooled in IPA or APsaA institutes dates back much further than Bernfeld's remarks, but this excerpt of his assessment could have been written, as you will soon see, by the authors of the centerpiece of the special section on psychoanalytic education to follow. Among others who have diagnosed its major limitations, recognized its significant strengths, and offered new educational options, the late Robert Wallerstein's prolific contributions to this discussion (1972, 1978, 1991, 1993, 1998, 2007a,b, 2009, 2011, 2012; Wallerstein and Weinshel 1989; Wallerstein and Fonagy 1999) are noteworthy; were he to have lived, he would have been one of the continuing contributors to this debate.
JAPA welcomes the collaborative paper by Otto Kernberg and Robert Michels that presents their assessment of the current state of psychoanalytic education and offers a comprehensive proposal for enhancing its future. In this, their first co-authored work on psychoanalytic education, Kernberg and Michels join forces to account for the decline in the status of psychoanalysis as both a profession and a science, as well as a theory