Symposium: Selection Criteria for the Training of Psycho-Analytic Students1

Both in our research work and at our Congresses we are accustomed to direct our interest to problems of very varying character, in the fields of clinical, theoretical, and applied analysis. In all these ways we manifest our interest in analysis and in our patients. But we do not generally turn to consider ourselves in our capacity as psycho-analysts.

The symposium to which this paper is a contribution is concerned with investigating us analysts ourselves. Its forerunner was Freud's analysis of his own dreams; the countertransference is the direct descendant of that self-analysis. Selection criteria concern our own countertransference, our individual ego-ideals, our interpersonal relations. They fall within the ambit of an even larger subject, the analysis of the analyst himself. Though even when selection criteria are tied up with the very concrete business of making a fitting choice among would-be entrants to our profession, it implies something much more complex, and inevitably has its personal aspects. In discussing selection criteria we all, consciously or unconsciously, reexperience our own past selves, face our current personal projections and identifications, and seek to discover, select, and train those aspirants whom we consider able to become our ideological heirs, to whom our own mission and task can be bequeathed, into whom, in the future, we can project ourselves.

All this means that the field of selection is one in which our emotions play a large part: that the qualities that we seek in our students are largely determined by our own ideologies, by our own personal approach to psycho-analysis, and by our own desire to enlist supporters for our own viewpoints. The very fact that the field is so personal made us turn, in our search for objectivity, to impersonal means, alien to our technique, such as psychological tests, etc. Selection has been in recent times a common theme of panel discussions, symposia, and research