The Crisis of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytical Training: The Suffering of the Candidate on the Long Road Towards Qualification1

The author assesses the impact of the so-called ‘crisis of psychoanalysis’ on the training of candidates, and on those who accompany them through the course. Different causes of the most relevant symptom of the crisis, i.e. the difficulty of finding patients for a four-sessions-weekly analysis, are considered. According to the author, analysts themselves must bear some of the responsibility for it. She draws attention to a number of interrelated phenomena, such as: trainees’ tension in their encounters with potential analysands, due to awareness of their own needs as trainees; the necessity to accept very disturbed patients whose selection might arouse criticism from the training committee; analyses in which trainees seem to become patients’ hostages because of ever-present fears of interruption; the difficult construction of a psychoanalytic identity in trainees who also are in full-time psychiatric practice; trainees’ profound uncertainty about the future both of psychoanalysis in general and their own careers in particular. In agreement with Kernberg, the author stresses the importance of considering the ‘crisis of psychoanalysis’ as a phenomenon whose development may be influenced by the analysts themselves.