Evolution in Mind

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. (Megginson, 1964)

Psychoanalytic education, transmission, training, and pedagogy mean different things to different segments of the psychoanalytic universe. Even Freud's psychoanalysis means different things to different schools, so here we all are, situated in the now 21st century, over 100 years since Freud's paper “On Narcissism (1914/1957)”. I mention this one particular paper because it foreshadowed almost all of the ongoing difficulties that all analysts are contending with when they address psychoanalytic education, transmission, training, and pedagogy.

There are now three officially accepted models of psychoanalytic education, each of which contains the roots of intergenerational oppositionality. There are the Berlin/Eitingon, the French, and the Uruguayan models, all of which are based on the classically pedagogical structure of analysis, supervision, and seminar. Whether competency is decided by potential, or by finishing an analysis before one embarks on further training, or some combination of the vagaries of both, as in the Uruguayan model, the point is that analytic institutions, even as they attempt to modify tradition, seem to fall prey to repeating those very issues that they originally opposed. The intergenerational insights of both psychoanalytic pleasures and unpleasures, which can be seen in terms of a range of narcissistic manifestations, become the essence of what is institutionalized unconsciously within all psychoanalytic institutions. And so it is my contention that this institutionalization and intergenerational oppositionality have become the dual hallmarks of the near impossibility of any sort of rational resolution to the difficulties faced by psychoanalysis in this 21st century.

While some schools eschew the very concept of science, others have embraced its benefits without adhering to its rigorous