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In the USA the education of the vast majority of psychoanalysts takes place at established training institutes. Until the last few decades, the best and most prestigious institutes would only admit physicians for psychoanalytical training. Although some of these training institutes admit only token numbers of non-medical candidates, the trend is clearly in the direction of accepting psychologists and social workers. There are even some plans in the offing to provide training in psychoanalysis for psychiatric nurses at some of the institutes.
There are large and many small training institutes who accept candidates from different disciplines, medicine, psychology, social work, nursing and education. In the major cities of the U.S.A. there is an ever increasing number of training institutes. Some train their candidates in only one theoretical mode, Freudian, Kohutian, Object Relations, Interpersonal-Relational, and others. However, there is a developing trend to offer several “tracts” of differing orientations which compete for candidates. The Postgraduate Institute, for example, provides training in the first two years of candidacy in the classical Freudian model, followed by two years of elective courses in Self Psychology and Object Relations. Candidates may choose their training analysts and supervisors from any of these three schools of psychoanalysis.
As is quite typical in the USA, Postgraduate Institute provides four years of course work and readings, requires personal analysis for at least four years, as well as three hours of supervision per week for four years. The course work and reading have as their goal the teaching of the theoretical underpinnings of psychopathology and of clinical technique. Supervision aims toward the integration of theory and clinical technique in the treatment of the candidates' patients by means of process notes. The candidate is taught how to listen to the patient, to be sensitive to latent meaning, to identify resistances and how t