Psychoanalytic Training Institutes

Dear Sir,

I was glad to find a mention in Dr Werman's letter about a trend in the psychoanalytic community towards a change in regard to our institutes, from trade schools to centres of graduate-level studies.

Although I'm not a training analyst (out of choice), nonetheless psychoanalytic education has been and continues to be a preoccupation from the perspective of an ex-candidate. As a consequence of it, I handed a letter to Dr Wallerstein in 1987, just before the Montreal Congress, in which I outlined the reason why a change of our institutes to graduate studies at a university would be desirable. After the business meeting, and in response to a call of Dr Wallerstein, I wrote a memo to the IPA in which I proposed that the IPA change its legal status from a private institution to an International Graduate School with extension programmes in different countries. I believe the time has come for psychoanalysis to become a career in its own right, with an academic degree recognised by the respective authorities of each country and a licence to practise conferred by them.

Our curriculum would be inter-disciplinary, including some of the basic studies of medicine, psychology, philosophy of science, humanities, linguistics etc. Psychoanalysis proper studied integratively with the other subjects. Following Freud's Lay Analysis, adapted to our times.

The analysis of a future analyst should be conducted outside of the academic structure by competent clinicians, while the theoretical teaching and supervision honoured by the degree of professor. Without this separation, training analysts exercise too many functions within the present structure of institutes, and so are vested with too much power, creating an anti-analytic setting. It is illusory to believe that a good-enough analysis can be conducted on both sides of the analysand/analyst dyad. According to this model, the evaluation of the student will happen in an open forum along the years of study and on different l