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Freud has a triad concept or goal for psychoanalysis: training, patient care and research. Thomä & Kachele, two German colleagues, wrote: “It is plain that evening courses, of the kind held in traditional psychoanalytic institutions, are inadequate to achieve this goal” (1).
How is it possible that our “impossible profession” as Freud named it, has gained its unique status in western countries, even though it is taught at evening courses? Why is psychoanalysis so impossible that it may cause what John Frosch (2) calls “The New York psychoanalytic civil war” also described by a journalist, Janet Malcolm (3), in her amusing pieces on The impossible profession in the New Yorker magazine.
Let us regard the psychoanalytic institutes as the present homes of psychoanalysis. The explicit objectives of these homes are to train candidates and to secure responsible patient care. Research is the hidden objective, the sleeping dog.
Training is taken care of by the training committees, who decide whom to call as training analysts and supervisors and whom to select as candidates.
The control of the second explicit objective, patient care, follows the decisions of the training committees. Everybody authorized may be responsible for this task. The third objective, research, with all its methodological problems, is the stepchild for which there is neither time, interest nor money.
Psychoanalytic research is not to be limited to excellent studies like Kächele's. At training institutes research could just as well be defined as indepth studies of clinical practice and theory. Contemporary Psychoanalysis (the William Alanson White journal) is an eminent example of this approach.
Lack of research is a serious problem for the development of our profession and a key factor in the civil war.
Psychoanalysis has a long history in Norway, although we are deceptively modest about it. The first psychiatric textbook in the world to mention psychoanalysis was published in Norway in 1905. In the 1920s two