The Independent Institute

Should Institutes for Training in Psychoanalysis be Independently Organized or as Subdivisions of Departments of Psychiatry of Medical Schools?

Because so much of the instruction has to be on an individual basis (i.e., one teacher to one student) the ratio of teachers to students must be high in psychoanalytic institutes. A typical example is the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, where there are about fifty-five instructors for a student body of 125 students, and where an even larger body of instructors is needed specifically to carry on preparatory analyses and to supervise the analyses which are conducted by advanced students. The more preparatory and supervisory analysts there are, the more students can be accommodated in lectures and seminars. The peculiar feature of psychoanalytic education is the fact that a one-to-one relationship exists in the preparatory analysis and again in supervision. This creates a bottleneck at the initial and final steps of the curriculum. It is worth considering whether or not the final bottleneck of supervision might not be eased at least partially by conducting supervisory sessions in the presence of a small group of advanced students (e.g., about five).

Furthermore, it is of fundamental importance that each student should have instruction from and contact with several analysts, and especially that his preparatory analysis, his seminars, his theoretical lectures, his technical lectures, and his supervision should not all be given by the same few teachers, however outstanding these may be. In a large faculty any lack of balance in the presentation of theory and technique which arises because of the personal biases of any enthusiastic and dogmatic theoretician can actually be turned to advantage if the influence of each individual teacher is balanced by contacts with other training analysts who represent varied viewpoints. All of this means that psychoanalytic faculties should be large. Yet even those medica