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Having been involved all my professional life in psychoanalytic education, I am delighted to have been asked to comment on this paper by Otto Kernberg and Robert Michels on a matter close to my heart.
My own experience as a teacher differs somewhat from theirs. It involves less immersion in institute-based education and perhaps more work with professionals new to psychoanalysis, with psychoanalytically oriented therapists who are not fully trained analysts, and with analysts trained outside the American Psychoanalytic Association. My own analytic education was entirely outside APsaA, and so I have only a partial understanding of the complexities of its controversies about certification, the training analyst system, and similar issues.
Thus, although I am an insider to efforts to improve analytic education, I am an outsider to the battles in APsaA and the IPA, of which both Kernberg and Michels are veterans. Perhaps because of my outsider status, despite finding myself in accord with the spirit of their critique of analytic training, I have some questions about the means for improvement that they suggest, both jointly and separately. I am more radical than either author on questions of training, probably because I have not been part of the systems they are endeavoring to change.
The pleas in their paper for theoretical diversity, egalitarianism, and transparency mirror the sensibility that characterized my psychoanalytic training in the early 1970s at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. NPAP fostered a notably democratic learning culture in which a range of analytic ideas were taught. NPAP has never distinguished between a personal analysis and a training analysis, or between