A Proposal for Innovation in Psychoanalytic Education

I believe that the educational stagnation and underlying authoritarian structure of psychoanalytic education derives largely from the present-day training analysis system as a major source of inhibition of the educational process. In earlier work (, ), I have explored how the fearful conservatism regarding changes in our educational methodology, the dogmatic approach to the conceptual aspects of theory and technique, and the un-resolvable, un-analyzable idealization of the training analyst as a combination of excellent clinician, ideal supervisor and seminar leader, and administrative leader of the institution are intimately linked. The protective isolation of psychoanalytic institutes from their scientific and academic environments, the restriction of the teaching faculty so that no major scholar from a related discipline participates in the central educational venture, the infantilization of the candidates whose idealization of their training analysts cannot be fully resolved, the distrust of alternative ideas and schools different from the dominant approach of any particular institute, all are major symptoms of the training analysis system, quite extensively analyzed and documented in recent contributions.

I propose that the appropriate quality control of the graduate psychoanalyst be assured by the development of a psychoanalytic Specialty Board that offers specialty certification in psychoanalysis to all graduates after a certain number of years of experience—probably somewhere around five, which provides the possibility for the graduate to have added one more “generation” of advanced or completed psychoanalyses since his or her graduation. Although we desperately need research on objective criteria for competence in carrying out psychoanalytic treatment, in practice, as part of the development of methods of selection of training analysts in recent years, empirical experience on the evaluation of their acqui