Who should become a Psychoanalyst?

So who should become an analyst? I am inclined to say anyone who is truly willing! Any person who is capable of enduring the personal, professional, emotional, and intellectual ordeal, not to mention the financial hardship, of psychoanalytic training, should become an analyst if he or she really wants to. I don't think that this adds up to very many people.

I am assuming that beneath this question —who should become an analyst?—lies our anxiety about the quality of the candidates we train and of the analysts we graduate. To the extent that this is the underlying concern, I think that it would be useful to shift the emphasis of the question. Instead of “Who should become an analyst?” we might consider asking “Who should become a training analyst?” I suggest this because, aside from a few obvious issues in screening and selecting candidates, which I shall address briefly, the best answer to the question “Who should become an analyst?” is simply “Candidates who have been well trained,” and the single most important factor in determining whether candidates are well trained is the quality of the analysts who analyze, supervise, and teach them.

I am skeptical of the prophylactic benefits of screening candidates on psychological grounds. I am well aware that certain kinds of defensive organization make it very difficult to do analysis. But the attempt to judge in advance whether these contraindicated factors are present—and if present, whether or not they are analyzable—is likely to be a hit-and-miss affair, often reflecting little more than the biases of the interviewers, perpetuating our self-serving assumptions about what kind of persona an analyst should have.

In selecting applicants, we need to be thinking in terms of a few basic issues. In summarizing them, I borrow some ideas from the approach taken by the late Alastair MacLeod, who was one of my three interviewers when I applied for analytic training to the Quebec English Institute in 1985. The official part of McLeod