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Otto Kernberg and Robert Michels, along with most readers of this journal, are intellectually and emotionally committed to psychoanalysis as a science, as a clinical practice, and as a moral-ethical framework. Both men are among our most distinguished psychoanalytic educators, and when they propose a new model for psychoanalytic education, anyone concerned with the future of psychoanalysis should listen and take note.1
Their paper links the vulnerability of the educational system to the troubles that beset psychoanalysis. They point to the field's increasing distance from the nucleus of modern culture and the central position it occupied for much of the last century. The standards that most psychoanalytic institutes use to assess appropriate knowledge, skill, and competence for qualification as either analyst or training analyst are loosely specified, subjectively assessed, and prone to perverse incentives, and therefore do not adequately protect individuals or groups from potentially iniquitous processes. The authors' basic claim, that mechanisms for quality control in psychoanalysis are lacking, finds echoes in many recent appraisals of its systems (Coopersmith 2010; Schneider et al. 2014; Szecsödy 2008; Wallerstein 2007; Zimmer 2003).
Kernberg and Michels go on to link their pedagogical challenges to the far deeper problem of the relationship of psychoanalytic institutions