The Dilemma of Training Analysis

AS A PARTICIPANT OF THIS SYNPOSIUM I have no doubt, that I will add to the "Complexities of Teaching and Learning Psychotherapy." Bromberg (1974), Davidson (1974), and Lefer (1974) held a workshop at the IVth International Forum on psychoanalytic training. In their presentation they covered three dimensions which tend to cause problems in the psychoanalytic training process.

• 1There is the dimension of the "analytic school." The institutionalizing of analytic training leads to certain defenses in the form of rules and regulations which create a hierarchy in the structure of the organization. There is a tendency to replicate similar status and privilege problems found in the society at large. There also is an emphasis on selecting candidates who are relatively pliable and can be influenced more readily.

• 2There is the candidates' tendency to overvalue admission to the institute. There is either a conformity to institutional authority or a self-defeating rebellion against this transferential agent.

• 3The training analysts, supervisors and instructors may become overzealous in their "institutional fidelity" and reflect the pressure they feel from "above."

My topic is the discussion of the training or didactic analysis one of the less discussed aspects of learning and teaching in the psychoanalytic literature. The bulk of the literature deals with institutional analysis, the learning problems of candidates and the supervisory process.

If psychoanalysis in its process of institutionalization organizes itself along the same hierarchical, elitist and status orientations we find in the wider social order, the tendency is to close itself into a school in which the "teaching of a science" gives way to a process of indoctrination. The result is the induction of a clinical theory that may become dogma or undisguised ideology. I believe that Davidson (1974) had this in mind when she referred to the "good child model" in teaching and learning psychoanalysis. It is a model which