A View from the Receiving End

“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.' This is the opening line of an essay by Bacon, who is unable to supply anything more than a few well-chosen aphorisms on a notoriously knotty subject. I wonder if people really bother to ask the same fundamental question about education, and, in particular, about psychoanalytic education. What is it, what does it consist in? The articles by Jeremy Holmes, Martin Stanton and Jane Kitto in the Winter 1993 and Autumn 1994 numbers of this Journal suggest that the psychoanalytic world is trying to avoid asking it at all costs. One person who at least attempts to explain the meaning of the term is Raymond Williams (1976) in his delightful book Keywords - A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.

The entry for educated starts as follows:

To educate was originally to rear or bring up children, from educare (Latin) - to rear or foster (rather than from educere - lead forth, develop, of which educare is an intensive form) … The wide sense has never quite been lost but it has been specialized to organized teaching and instruction since the early Seventeenth Century and predominantly so since the late Eighteenth Century. (Williams 1976, pp. 111-2)

Since the central thesis of psychoanalysis is indeed that the child is the father of the man (perhaps more politically and psychoanalytically correctly, the child is the parents of the person) then it could be said that we are all engaged in a process of analysing education in its original and, I think, its most appealing sense.

So, how is this reflected in the realities of a psychoanalytic education? In practical terms education is subsumed to and paradoxically both mysteriously and prosaically becomes the process of being taught, of being trained, of learning, or the experience of being a student. I have been a trainee psychotherapist with the Arbours, or more elegantly, a psychotherapist in training. I hope that I remain the latter whilst, if I am honest, I am relieved