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It is a privilege to comment on Otto Kernberg and Robert Michels's “Thoughts on the Present and Future of Psychoanalytic Education.” Their paper reflects their insight and experience regarding all aspects of psychoanalytic institutional, intellectual, and clinical life, in the context of many decades of leadership in psychiatry and medicine. All of this affords them a rare platform from which to diagnose and offer solutions for problems on the psychoanalytic scene. Indeed, they offer a wide-ranging and outspoken analysis of the current status of our field. Their broad and deep familiarity with these matters has already been evidenced by their extensive contributions to the literature.
This paper is timely, as the American Psychoanalytic Association is reforming the training analyst system and reevaluating the relationship between local institutes and the national, as these authors note. In addition, there is indeed much concern among analysts, in the U.S. and elsewhere, about the marginalization of analysis in the mental health care market and in academic departments of psychiatry, psychology, and social work, as well as in the broader culture. Although the two authors have substantial disagreements about the sources of the current difficulties (which they delineate openly), Kernberg and Michels offer a pungent analysis of these problems. They are united and typically forceful in their call for clearer, more objective methods to evaluate psychoanalytic competence in education and promotion. Such methods, they predict, would lead to changes in both organizational governance and curriculum, including the waning of the TA system, a prospect they deem desirable. They