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The IPA Conferences on Training began in 1965. They take the form of small group meetings, usually with no more than one training analyst from each society. The aim in setting them up was to maintain awareness and consideration of the problems relating to psychoanalytic education.
The termination of an analysis is a powerful emotional experience both for the analyst and the patient and it always presents the analyst with some dilemmas. These dilemmas are even more crucial in a training analysis because of the institutional involvement. Many questions were raised about institutional involvement and its impact on the outcome of training analysis and the actuality of the tripartite model in the small group discussions.
Jean-Michel Quinodoz began his introductory remarks with a reminder that the 1985 Conference was mainly concerned with the termination of the training analysis and psychoanalytic institutions. At this conference, he said, he wanted to emphasise the clinical dilemmas facing the training analyst. He listed some thought-provoking questions aimed at inviting the audience to share their experience of these issues, all of which, he added, were facets of the following principal questions: from a clinical point of view, what characterises a training analysis and, more particularly, what characterises its termination?
He then made the important comment that: ‘our questions today are probably more important than ever, because after focusing at length on highly technological scientific research, the contemporary world is now rediscovering that our patients need us to care for them, and that it is necessary to train people to do this, and do it well. Otherwise we will wake up to a world in which there will be no one trained to listen for the unconscious. We would then be faced with the “silent spring” mentioned by the well-known scientist Nancy C. Andreasen (1998), referring to the vacuum left too long in clinical psychopathology as the focus turned towards technology,