Editorial

How do you become a psychoanalyst? Bring some psychoanalysts together and ask them to discuss this issue, and you will find that this apparently simple question breaks into deeply held convictions and opinions. How different psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic groups have solved this question makes up the bulk of the history of psychoanalysis. In October 1994 The Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft did bring together a number of analysts to discuss this question from the perspective of how various institutes organize their training. In this issue of IFP you can meet three of the participants, arguing for widely different views: Arne Jemstedt from the Swedish Society for Holistic Psychotherapy and Psychoanilysis, Jochen Kemper from Círculo Psicoanalítico do Rio de Janeiro and Franz Wellendorf from the Deutsche psychoanalytische Gesellschaft. Reading these three papers together makes for an emotional and intellectual experience having ideological, historical, philosophical and educational dimensions.

One possible vector in the reading of the three contributions is the critical hermeneutics developed by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1, 2, 3). In this perspective Kemper is presenting not only ideals, but also a praxis, where subjectivity is strongly stressed. This is akin to the hermeneutic tradition which originated and blossomed within German Romanticism. One may wonder if Kemper's own roots in Germany have some importance for this bias at the side of other intriguing historical factors presented in his paper. The freedom and responsibility of the individual is thus placed in the center of the radical change of the paradigm for psychoanalytic training which Círculo Psicoanalítico is performing.

If Kemper tends towards the subjectifying pole, Jemstedt and Wellendorf may be said to argue for the importance of an objectifying stance, represented by ‘the Institute’. Especially Wellendorf's article, can be read as a careful phenomenological description of psychoanal