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Reality does not change simply because we choose to ignore it (, 1976, personal communication).
Our psychoanalytic discipline has its origins, has evolved and is still located within a congregational network that blends and binds together, in an inextricable yet contradictory way, the characteristic prerogatives and functions of a ‘movement’ and a ‘cause’ (e.g. being quasi-religious, ideological, socio-political) with the representative prerogatives and functions of a science and an academic profession (Eisold, 1994, 1997; Steiner, 1994; Bergman, 1997). For the past 100 years we have taken for granted that the ‘unique’ and ‘special’ nature of psychoanalytic education justifies the extension of this inherited organisational and educational syncretism.
Over the period of a century—and as a result of the actively perpetuated interplay of historical determinants and organisational and educational incongruities—our isolated and traditional societies/institutes of psychoanalysis have amalgamated and regenerated the absolutist syncretism that had been inherent in the psychoanalytic movement at the beginning of the 20th century. Starting from the organisational and the educational dissonances, the implicit chimera—the congenital aberration of the initial group of our founders (our primal Society-Institute)—of condensing educational criteria and proselytism into a closed system of hegemonic surveillance has degenerated into the current meta-state wherein the International Psychoanalytic Association and its component societies/institutes appropriate to themselves and syncretically superimpose prerogatives and irreconcilable functions, such as: