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Like the weather, psychoanalytic education in the United States in the early 1950s was widely discussed, but nobody did much about it—nobody, that is, but Joan Fleming, who galvanized her colleagues into action. This book, which starts with an illuminating Foreword by Robert Wallerstein, is a celebration of the high educational standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr Fleming was successively
Secretary and Chair of the Board on Professional Standards and served on a variety of pivotal committees that developed and implemented its policies and procedures. The selections from her writings in the volume under review present her positions and give some indication of the integrity and the dedication with which she worked on systematic approaches to teaching psychoanalysis. At times, though too rarely, the personality of their author, which accounted for much of her influence, shines forth from these pages. To the reader who had no chance to meet her in person, I would recommend starting with Chapter 8 (previously unpublished), 'The education of a supervisor', which includes an appealing account of her experiences in a seminar for newly graduated residents who were beginning supervision of first-year residents.
My disillusionment with myself came quickly, and my goals and methods had to be revised. We were not on the same track. They were scared, and I wanted to talk about theories of teaching. When I turned on my empathic radar, listening to the anxiety, observing the regression in these young people, I made a diagnosis of transference distortions in their image of a supervisor. They saw a supervisor and a teacher as an exalted, omniscient, omnipotent authority (p. 151).
From there she moved on, gradually teaching them through 'exercises' how to make an 'educational diagnosis' of their supervisees' problems—'this step naturally came before a remedy for the student's problem' (p. 152)—moving fr