Commentary on Kernberg and Michels

Otto Kernberg and Robert Michels have provided a rich, nuanced, and fair-minded overview of a familiar perspective on what currently ails North American psychoanalytic education and its professional surround. They offer their take on steps needed to improve matters professionally, educationally, and organizationally. By way of full disclosure as a commentator on their contribution, I should note that, like both authors, I have spent my entire career as a full-time faculty member at a major American research university, which contains within its medical school psychiatry department the psychoanalytic institute to which I belong and in which I have held a variety of positions. Further, both Kernberg and Michels have had personal generative impact on my career development and have my gratitude, respect, and affection. We know each other well enough for them to easily recognize a gratuitous disclaimer for what is to follow. To be sure, I heartily agree with their view regarding the outdated usefulness of the current training analyst system and its often pernicious effects on institute life, creating an unfair hierarchy and undermining attention to improving educational methodology and developing research interests. I concur that developing a thoughtful, comprehensive, and transparent methodology for certifying psychoanalysts at a national level is possible and important in maintaining our professional standing, both among ourselves and with others in health care and in neighboring academic and professional disciplines.

That said, I would like to draw some distinctions, underline certain biases, many of which I have often shared, and offer for further consideration some tentative ideas that differ in emphasis and perspective from what Kernberg and Michels propose. In our contemporary world, I think