Training- and Control-Analysis

In no school or university at the present day does psycho-analytical training form part of the curriculum, a circumstance which, despite certain disadvantages, has had this advantage: that individual analytical Societies have been free to experiment until, from the large body of experience amassed, our present system has been built up.

The reason why psycho-analysis has not yet found a place in the syllabus of any faculty is not merely that it has encountered resistance amongst leading scientific authorities. Analytical training presents difficulties which make it impossible to include it in the ordinary programme of scientific instruction as we have it to-day. No more than any other therapeutic method can psycho-analysis be learnt from books and lectures only. And there is a peculiar difficulty in the fact that it is impossible to make patients the object of a demonstration of the analytic method of treatment. For this reason analysis demands special sacrifices from its students. Students of medicine are under no obligation to test in their own persons the mechanisms of disease; they learn the structure of the body by examining the bodies of others. Only by being analysed himself, however, can the analyst discover the general laws by which the psyche is governed and the specific factors which influence its development in health or disease. Only by the investigation of his own personality can he arrive at the conviction that there is an unconscious mental life which influences the behaviour of all human beings, normal or abnormal.

This investigation of the mind is the most important part of analytical training. It was for this reason that Freud analysed his dreams, in order by so doing to become acquainted with his own unconscious. Those who have read his work on the interpretation of dreams, in which he describes but a part of these dream-analyses, will have realized the difficulties involved in such a self-analysis. Truly, only the enthusiasm of the scien