Roundtable on Division 39 Practice Survey

If the survey respondents are a representative sample of American psychoanalysts: we fall into two groups, one fairly satisfied and secure, the other moderately dissatisfied and anxious; we're mature [60ish], over two-thirds women, in practice 20 to 24 years. In other words, we began training around the time the psychoanalytic fall from grace was underway but was still being significantly denied by our mentors, from whom we have a different social and gendered sensibility, but to whom we are still heir. One way to contextualize the crisis of psychoanalysis is as a crisis of generations, augmented by our own long apprenticeships and consequent maturational lags, occurring in the midst of a wider cultural shift that privileges change over tradition. While our forbears needed us for their vitality, we face a poverty of legatees. The critical population of psychoanalytic patients having been psychoanalytic candidates, psychoanalysis has some resemblances to a pyramid scheme nearing the end of a long run.

Two unambiguous findings initially seem paradoxical. First, respondents give most credit to their psychoanalytic training for the success of their practices. Second, we overwhelmingly see patients once a week. How can we explain that in our intellectual activity we overwhelmingly promote theories of therapeutic action that require significantly greater frequency than our actual practice and are thus dissociated from quotidian clinical reality, and thus make us suspect other dissociations of dearly held theory and practice? [John Gedo's similar report of the absolute dominance of once-weekly sessions in practices of members of the American Psychoanalytic Association over 25 years ago, just at the time our respondents were beginning their careers, suggests a long-term denial of a split between the reality of practice and emotionally invested clinical theory.]

Ricardo Ainslie (RA)

It is impossible to miss the obvious. The Division is aging and the division is a