Commentary

I was confused by Paul Israel's paper until I realized that the term ‘training analyst’ means something quite different to him than it does to me. This illustrates what is perhaps the most important lesson from our dialogue, that conversation across languages and across cultures can be difficult, misunderstandings frequent, and confusion likely. Israel uses the term to refer to analysts who are associated with institutes and who participate in selection, supervision, classroom teaching, seminars and evaluation, but specifically not to those who participate by conducting the personal analyses of psychoanalytic candidates. I would call this category ‘faculty analyst,’ while to me (and I believe to most of the psychoanalytic community) ‘training analyst’ refers to an analyst who analyzes candidates in training. Israel describes a training arrangement in which a ‘personal analysis’ is said to have no relationship to the institute, and therefore in his terms the analyst who conducts a ‘training analysis’ is not thereby a ‘training analyst.’ In most of the psychoanalytic world, the question of whether there should be a training analyst status translates to what should be the criteria for selecting those analysts who are to analyze candidates. I will return to this meaning of the question below.

Israel does not discuss this but instead focuses on the selection and education of analysts who carry out every other faculty function in an institute. He calls these faculty ‘training analysts,’ but without suggesting that they are appropriate analysts for candidates. Here I thoroughly agree with him. A faculty member may be an excellent evaluator for selection or graduation, an excellent classroom teacher or seminar leader, or even an excellent supervisor without necessarily being an appropriate analyst of candidates. These are distinct functions, and faculty should be considered and evaluated for participating in each of them separately. Many institutes have long assumed that sel