Commentary on Kernberg and Michels

The institute in which I trained, and now teach and supervise, the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, is a member neither of the American Psychoanalytic Association nor of the International Psychoanalytical Association. A major reason for this is that we chose not to have a training analyst system. Candidates can choose their analysts and supervisors from among all who are certified as graduate analysts, from any institute. Upon graduation, all are deemed qualified to supervise and teach. A tenet of the institute is that candidates are adult learners, and all graduates are assumed to be competent once they have completed the required coursework, supervisions, and a final project. Our founding curriculum included a course in gender and a course in culture, both of which remain in the curriculum. I taught my first courses at the institute in the very first years of its establishment, long before I was an analyst. When I began teaching in the early nineties, I had finished training as a psychoanalytically oriented clinical psychologist, but my area of expertise, psychoanalytic feminist gender theory, was developed not in my training as a clinician but during my previous training as a Ph.D. in comparative literature. While teaching, serving on committees, and eventually training at my institute, I also taught courses in psychoanalysis and gender and in psychoanalysis and culture in Harvard's women's studies and social studies departments from 1989 to 2005. When I first began teaching gender at my institute, several papers that we taught came from the academic world, but by around 2005, when I began teaching psychoanalysis and culture there, we were able to find enough papers written by