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This is an important book. It concerns how the psychoanalytic system of education affects psychoanalytic institutes and organisations, and, conversely, how the organisation functions as a conservative agent against amendments of the education system. Reeder's views are reminiscent of Kernberg's rough discussion of the institutional problems of psychoanalytic education in 1986, where he introduced four models of organisation (the art academy, the trade school, the religious retreat and the university college), and concluded that:
… a serious discrepancy exists between the prevalent, explicitly formulated or implicitly acknowledged aims of psychoanalytic education and the dominant organizational structures that characterize psychoanalytic institutes. In my view, while psychoanalytic educators think they are transmitting what is both an art and a science, they have structured their institutes so that they correspond most closely to a combination of the technical school and the theological seminary (Kernberg, 1986, p. 812).
Reeder's central thesis is that there are aspects of the analytic education that have detrimental effects on the candidates, the institutes, and on psychoanalysis as a whole. These effects, he claims, are antithetical to the spirit we aim at in analytical work. Furthermore, he believes that the tripartite educational system still prevalent in most institutes, consisting of training analysis, supervision and seminars, which has its roots in the Berlin Institute of the 1920s, is formed in a way that gives the candidates an inhibiting, professional superego. It also causes the development of what he calls an institutional superego system in analytic organisations. These phenomena interact in a dialectical way, forming a structure which he calls the psychoanalytic superego complex. This complex, in turn, has considerable negative