The Distribution of Training Analysis*

The problem of training analysis has as one of its many bottlenecks the lack of a sufficient number of training analysts. It was thought that it would be worth while to explore this problem in order to ascertain exactly what are the facts. With this in mind we contacted the various training institutes.

The panorama of psychoanalytic training in this country is changing so rapidly that any statistics and numbers such as these are dated. The figures* as shown in Tables I and II were gathered during the three months following the midwinter meeting of the APA in New York in December, 1949. For this period of time, the numbers are accurate and complete. They are significant in relation to these times and may allow us to predict a few trends in analytic training.

Table No. I reveals several significant facts. At first, as usual, one finds the small number of members surprising. Every time an analyst looks at statistics of his association and society, he expects larger numbers. There seem to be only 160 training analysts. This means that as a national average, 38% of members are appointed training analysts. This is probably a somewhat higher percentage than might be expected. The highest rate of training analysts in relation to members is held by Chicago with 53%, and the lowest by Detroit with only 22%. As a rule, it can be concluded that the largest societies are the older ones, and that they have a higher percentage of training analysts than the smaller, newer ones.

This relation is brought out more clearly in Table No. II, which groups the greater societies of New York, Boston, Chicago and Detroit together, which shows a higher than average percentage of training analysts than the group covering Los Angeles, Washington, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco and Topeka (36%).

The number of students shows a similar national distribution. The 160 training analysts train 708 students — of course with the help of a considerable number of lecturers not yet