You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Tenth Conference of Training Analysts1 set out to examine the structure of psychoanalytic education as well as current controversies concerning how best to transmit psychoanalytic thinking and encourage the generation of new knowledge. The conference began with introductory statements by Elias M. da Rocha Barros, chairperson of the organising committee for the conference, Otto F. Kernberg, outgoing president of the IPA, and Daniel Widlöcher, incoming president. These were followed by position papers by Luiz Meyer, Robert Michels, Sylvie Faure-Pragier and Anne-Marie Sandler.
Dr Rocha Barros suggested that the time has come to rethink Eitingon's tripartite model of psychoanalytic education. Psychoanalysis, he noted, now faces different pressures from those it faced when the model was devised. In academia, neuroscientists, epistemologists and scholars from other fields question the validity of psychoanalytic ideas. We need greater intellectual rigour if psychoanalysts are to engage in meaningful academic debate. Social and economic forces press us to dilute the essence of psychoanalytic practice. Rocha Barros warned against yielding to market pressures and emphasised that we must preserve our psychoanalytic theory and method in order to continue the investigation of the human mind. He stressed that we must maintain standards while avoiding authoritarianism; any exercise of power in institutes must be consistent with a theory of psychoanalytic education.
With respect to this theory, he warned against the concept of mothering as a model of training, which he feels seeks to sidestep conflict and leads to education based on simple identification. Our pedagogy should emphasise mutative emotional experiences and the understanding of their meanings over the acquisition of knowledge. Such a pedagogy develops the investigative mentality which leads to the growth of psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalytic institutes must encourage individual creativity, while maintaining a consi