‘The Crisis in Psychoanalysis’: What Crisis are We Talking About?

In this paper the author argues that the so-called crisis in psychoanalysis, often blamed on various external factors, is in fact an internal crisis brought about by intrinsic incongruities between the explicit intention of its educational model, which aspires to educate and train in a professional and scientific discipline, and its organisational structure, locally and internationally inextricable. Its isolated basic units of ecumenical control—its traditional ‘societies/institutes of psychoanalysis’—implicitly and explicitly co-impose the monastic transmission of a preponderantly doctrinaire education and clinical practice. The dysfunctional elongation of our historical organisational syncretism continues to force us, one century later, to amalgamate in and superimpose on an endogamous supraordaining system (i.e. our International Psychoanalytic Association) prerogatives and functions so contradictory that they are ordinarily considered irreconcilable, such as: education and scientific research (tasks of universities); societal and political (tasks of an ordinary society of professionals and technicians); and ‘as if’ certification and accreditation (tasks of external, local, interinstitutional collegiate bodies and independent, multirepresentative, national coalitions and consortia, as well as of local governmental legislation). The pervasive collective regressive phenomena derived from this homogamous and secluding organisational and educational syncretism has had a retardatory impact along all the hierarchy of our institutional activities. The future of psychoanalysis as a science and a clinical discipline must be nothing other than one of evolution and transformation. The survival of its legendary psychoanalytic institutes and societies, as well as its local and international organisation, with its inherited but now untenable syncretism, is that which is being questioned (that is, psychoanalysis as a ‘movement’ and a ‘cause’).