Psychoanalytic Training: Is There Any Need for Change?: A review of Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education by Emanuel Berman. Hillsdale, NJ:  The Analytic Press, 2004, pp.  279.

It Is Impossible to write a computer program to simulate effective human interactions because one cannot predict all the possible circumstances that may arise. Such is also the case with interactions in psychoanalysis. So is psychoanalysis impossible to teach? Or can it be taught?

Emanuel Berman's Impossible Training examines psychoanalytic education in the context of the historical tradition passed down by Abraham and Eitingon's Berlin model. Berman himself was trained at both the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute and the New York University Postdoctoral Program. His extensive and diverse training has stimulated him to think about the psychoanalytic educational process itself.

The first two chapters of Berman's book focus on the relationships of Freud and Ferenczi and of Klein and Winnicott, respectively. Berman wonders how training might be different had the influence of the first psychoanalytic institute established in 1919 by Ferenczi in Budapest not been short lived owing to the political upheavals in Hungary emanating from the rise of the right-wing Horty regime. The influence of the Berlin Institute, established in 1920, was felt in the countries where immigrants from Berlin settled, including the United States and Israel. Freud himself, in response to Bernfeld's desire to begin practicing before completing his own personal analysis, scoffed at the rigidity and formality of the Berlin values. Freud promptly referred a patient to Bernfeld. Berman notes that Freud never practiced supervision in a structured way, so that most early analysts were never supervised, and many were never analyzed either.

Abraham, Eitingon, and Jones warned Freud against the dangerous “deviations”