Response

As a writer of a paper I truly appreciate Mrs Eglé M. Laufer's time and devotedly dedicated efforts manifested in her commentary to my position statement regarding psychoanalytic training today.

Though her reply doesn't follow a classified system of headings, I will try to organise my response along the following salient themes in her writing.

Mrs Laufer found it difficult to enter into a discussion of a paper, where my criticisms ‘have to be taken as accepted facts … without much further discussion’.

From the outset of our candidate initiation rituals, we are accustomed to the unquestionability of our training plan. As training analysts, regarding our educational and organisational models, as an apothegm bearing an indisputable supreme purpose, we take for granted that our outcome must be the generative result of colleagues, whose training transcends that of their predecessors, leading to the assimilation of challenges derived from their respective times and spaces. Hence, it is painful to question ourselves as to whether, through our educational advocacy, we could, inadvertently, reinsert our collective organisational pathology, in such a way that our labours culminate in pseudo-generative actions.

The extreme vulnerability of the human condition to collective regressive phenomena runs parallel to our excessive resistance to acknowledge it. We find it unacceptable to admit the nature of our regressive organisational functioning, when the local and international ‘mirror’ in our secluding and secluded milieu, reconfirms and renders ego-syntonic our subjective experience of a collectively idealised co-constructed reality. Therefore, in spite of the generalised quality of our collective regressive manifestations, when these are pointed out to us, we usually respond with a sensation of bewilderment leading us to deny or, at best, rationalise them: ‘Well … but group regressive phenomena exist in every institution’.

It is not immu