On Candidate Selection and its Relation to Analysis1

I would like to say, by way of preface, that my paper is not quite what was asked of me. My particular task, as outlined by the Chairman of the Organizing Committee, Heinz Kohut, was to prepare a paper, having an international orientation, that would

enumerate, describe and discuss the methods that have already been used in the evaluation of applicants, the experiences with them, the various judgments about their usefulness, and … your own attitudes and opinions in regard to them.

Although this request was very reasonable, I did not respond directly to it. Instead, and this is what I want to explain, responding to the task stimulated an interest in certain broad issues of evaluation, with the result that the paper is largely a rather personal account of some of the things I wanted to say about candidate selection and its relation to analysis. The last third of the paper, however, does deal directly with a consideration of methods.

Introduction

Selecting the right kind of candidates has such obvious importance that it seems to need little proving. Analysts, and analysis itself, can never rise higher than the candidates selected for training, and, as Waelder (1962) points out, in training it is the selection of candidates "that is least subject to future correction" (p. 283). A good applicant turned down is a permanent loss, a mediocre one chosen adds nothing but mediocrity.

Selection, however, is more than making a choice among good, bad, and mediocre. Not uncommonly, the choice has little to do with what other Institutes might regard as good or bad, and instead reflects, unwittingly perhaps, but with considerable verity, the particular Institute's own special brand of analysis. In this sense, selection becomes a means of perpetuating not only general analytic ideals but locally idiosyncratic ones as well.

With a singular variable such as this hidden in the selection picture, writing knowledgeably about evaluation becomes difficult and leads perhaps