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The experiences of an analyst—and I suspect it is the same with every experience beyond mere routine—is not a simple coefficient of the duration in time and of the amount of material studied. The truth can be sometimes acquired in a flash of insight, whereas the ways of error may lead further astray the longer they last.
—Hanns Sachs (1947)
Psycho-analytic training has evolved from an initially rather informal preceptorship to a complex tripartite system of personal analysis; courses in theory and technique; and supervised analysis (Blitzten and Fleming, 1953); (Ekstein, 1953); (Grotjahn, 1953); (Lewin and Ross, 1960).
The interrelationship of these three pillars of training, their relative merits, and their specific methods are now receiving increased attention, but there is still a relative paucity of published communications on the subject.
Balint (1948) noted with surprise that until 1948 there were only two published articles on psychoanalytic training besides a short section by Freud in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937). Papers on training read at various meetings between 1927 and 1938 (Balint traced at least 10 of them) provoked lively controversies but never appeared in print. Some of them did appear in summaries. Balint's thorough and forthright critique of psycho-analytic training contributed to a change in the climate, and publications since then have dealt more frequently and with greater openness with problems of psycho-analytic education (DeBell, 1963); (Lewin and Ross, 1960). There is one notable exception, worth mentioning, to indicate that some reluctance to air educational problems has survived from those early days: The 1955 Panel Discussion of the American Psycho-analytic Association on "The Technique of Supervised Analysis" (Keiser, 1956) is reported with the name of participants and discussants omitted!
Supervision was formally introduced as a basic requirement in analytic training already in 1920 at the Berlin Institute (Balint, 1