The Training Analyst and the Difficulties in the Training Psychoanalytic Situation

The Organizing Committee has entrusted me with the task of introducing the conference topic which is concerned with the difficulties encountered by the training analyst in the psychoanalytic situation, with special reference to those difficulties attributable to the analyst, the training organization and the candidate. What follows is therefore intended to be a statement rather than a formal paper, and is partly a reflexion of the thinking which went on behind the choice of the topic. For the rest, it is based on the numerous communications which were sent to me by colleagues attending the conference and also on a number of papers which unfortunately could not be used as a basis for discussion for a variety of reasons.

In the early discussions we soon became aware that we were dealing with a variable set of relationships and that the outstanding nature of the relationship between analyst and student—patient had tended to cloud other important relationships which could interfere with the analytic situation. I am referring to the constant interaction between the analyst and the training institute, student and the institute, student and other students, analyst and his colleagues. We were also aware of the need to have a truly frank discussion with as many clinical references as possible about the intrapsychic processes which are involved in the sort of things we do; in the decisions we make; and in the small world of the institutes in which we live. With this in mind we hope that no time will be spent on going into diversionary issues involving problems peculiar to various locales (often of very grave nature) with loss of the desired focus on those processes which are our main concern and our expertise. Let us therefore leave those problems of a serious social or even political nature, external to psycho-analysis, to the sociologists or perhaps to the main Congress at some time in the future. Within the group of those psychoanalysts, who are also educators, the p