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The topic of this 7th Pre-Congress Conference on Training of the International Psycho-Analytical Association is 'The Principles, the Aims and the Procedures of Psychoanalytic Training as Represented in our Member Institutes'. It is not the first time that a Pre-Congress has set for itself so far-reaching and comprehensive a canvas; the 4th Pre-Congress held in Vienna in 1971, reported by Calef (1972), though given the much narrower title, 'The Assessment of Student Progress', ranged broadly, far beyond its declared title, over (surprisingly) much the same issues to which this paper (and this coming Pre-Congress) will address themselves. That Pre-Congress and Calef's summary covered such diverse areas as the fit of the philosophical goals of the training to the educational methods employed to realize them; the need for and the value of the maintenance of rigorous training standards as against the humility that needs be necessarily exercised in our assessments of students in view of our all too human fallibilities and ignorances; the various qualities we hope to develop or evoke in our candidates upon a successful passage through our training institutes; the proper role of the training analyst in regard to assessment and progression issues, together with the degree of imbrication with or separateness from the training sequence that the training analysis should maintain; the role of the formalization and institutionalization of training in fostering, or conversely, in hampering, the fullest realization of creative analytic potential in our students; and the role of evaluation per se in the training process, as well as the specification of the criteria for that evaluation at each step in the training progression. To this whole array of issues Calef declared the spirit of that Pre-Congress as follows: 'At least by implication, every facet of training (including the training analysis) was questioned as to its purpose and necessity' (p. 39).
This coming 7th Pre-Congress