Discussion

I WAS TROUBLED BY the title of this symposium. It seemed to imply that one can easily distinguish what is rational from what is irrational in psychoanalytic education. The fact is that there is very little that is "rational" in life, or in psychoanalytic education, if by rational we mean demonstrably proved beyond a reasonable doubt, by the systematic accumulation of evidence. And that which is rational, using such a definition, is probably not worth discussing. Those issues which still excite our interest and debate—those which are under discussion today—are probably the ones which are very un-rational and ambiguous.

I am sure we have all had the opportunity of treating patients who use reason and rationality in a defensive way, and from such experiences we know how often rationality can be used in the service of, or can mask, profound irrationality. Often such terms as rationality and irrationality contain subtle explicit or implicit value judgments. I suggest that we beware of the possibility that lurking behind our use of "rational" and "irrational" as these terms apply to psychoanalytic education, are professional value judgments of either a theoretical or practical nature; that what we might really mean by "rational" is "what I like."

It is probable that what passes for psychoanalytic education is a set of operations having various admixtures of the rational and irrational. Lacking any harder information at this time I suspect it would be very difficult to distinguish one from the other. Although