Response

My response is brief, and slightly disheartened! Michels's commentary clearly shows that there is not only a verbal misunderstanding here but also a different conception of what constitutes psychoanalytic training. My concept of the training analyst is specifically designed to avoid the distinction between the ‘training analyst’ and the ‘faculty analyst’ to which Michels returns, in line with a tradition that is more American than Anglo-Saxon. Let us therefore move on from a term, since Michels does not seem to be able to abandon it, to the question of the ‘training analyst’ (in French, analyste didacticien), and who, according to my respondent, is specifically responsible for the analysis of candidates in training.

I thought I had demonstrated in my article that none of the research so far conducted on this subject in recent decades has truly managed to define in what the ‘specific tasks and opportunities’ consist for analyses undertaken—in terms of the manifest wish—with a view to training, and in what respects these tasks fundamentally differ from those of every analyst, in every analysis! There is not space here to take up a discussion that can also be found in numerous writings devoted to the subject.

To make one final point, however: every analyst would probably agree with the statement that the wish to become an analyst should involve developing the personal analytic experience. Now, the act of embarking on the admission procedure in a training institute usually coincides with a termination of the analysis in a ‘soft’ consensus between analyst and analysand. This applies whether the analyst is officially involved in ‘training’ or is an ‘ordinary’ analyst. It is known that every sound analyst will seek to remedy this inadequacy through one or several phases.

Michels does, I think, betray some mischievousness when he purports to believe that the research to which I am referring is that advocated by an entire school of thought, objective research, which despite hav