A Report of the 4th Pre-Congress on Training, Vienna 1971, to the 27th International Psycho-Analytical Congress

The 4th Pre-Congress on Training chose as its topic 'The Assessment of Student Progress'. In preparation for the Pre-Congress a questionnaire was distributed to all the psychoanalytic institutes. Mis Pearl King collected the replies and charted the data. That effort could well become an ongoing study of the international psychoanalytic institutes in the manner inaugurated by Lewin and Ross of the institutes in the United States.

Though statistical charts may be overwhelming and to some degree incomprehensible for some, the particular data collected on this occasion are instructive and deserve careful scrutiny. The most superficial examination does reflect something of the educational and assessment practices of the institutes and permits certain inferences to be drawn. Though expectedly, there is some uniformity, the differences in the training requirements, their implementation and their assessment suggest philosophical as well as methodological differences from institute to institute. The inevitable errors and distortions inherent in the data collection and their summary notwithstanding, careful examination raises many questions. For example, why do so many of the institutes, whose candidates complete their therapeutic analyses before the didactic and supervisory work begin concern themselves so much with the question of reports from the personal analyst? Such reports might be considered irrelevant in any case at that stage of training! And why do some institutes with conscious and verbalized liberal attitudes about their candidates, wishing to avoid dependencies, nevertheless require very long periods of personal analysis and training? And how is it that in some instances their graduated candidates seem to be excluded from the institutes for long periods after they are done with training?

Perhaps a basic and summarizing question might be whether the philosophical and educational goals of the institutes are really the basis upon which the educational metho