Training Analysis—Past, Present and Future

The necessity of personal analysis for those 'who want to apply psychoanalytic technique' was expressed by Freud (1910) very early. Yet the evolution of the training analysis as the prerequisite and core of psychoanalytic education has been a slow process. This is not surprising. Psychoanalysis was conceived originally as an instrument of therapy; the personal analysis of the future analyst had the therapeutic goal of removing 'blind spots'. '[The idea] that one should be analysed for the purpose of learning the method had occurred to none of us …', said Eitingon (1937, p. 351). Since therapy and the preparation for the profession were to be achieved by the same method, the educational value of the psychoanalytic process appeared secondary during the years and decades when Freud and his followers were mainly interested in establishing solid foundations for their newly won knowledge. Gitelson (1964), in his last paper, following a theorem of Thomas Kuhn (1963), points out that the 'psychoanalytic movement' was becoming a 'normal science' by organizing its training system to prepare for and safeguard the future of psychoanalysis.

This, however, was not easy to achieve; it took several years of struggle marked by crises in the budding psychoanalytic organizations and by the catastrophe of the Hitler years. To outline it briefly, the 'movement' began to organize its training system by the establishment of the Berlin Institute in 1920, followed by the Institute in Vienna in 1921 and by others soon after. This training programme consisting of three interacting phases—training analysis, academic curriculum and supervised analyses—was codified in 1927. The training programme was followed in the already established institutes, yet I myself and, I believe, all those who entered the professional field of psychoanalysis in the early and even in the late 1920s, could testify how easy it was. The spreading of psychoanalysis and the appearance of eager students from dista