You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dear Candidate: Analysts from around the world offer personal reflections on psychoanalytic training, education, and the profession is a unique collection of letters from seasoned psychoanalysts, sharing both personal and professional reflections on their experiences as candidates. The 42 deeply personal letters, each addressing the “Dear Candidate”, are equally relevant to
psychoanalytic educators and inspiring to analysts at all levels. With each author discussing the complex feelings, anxieties, gratifications and frustrations that weave the fabric of their experience of psychoanalytic training, the reader is plunged into intimate and moving reminiscences of candidacy. Never dogmatic, the authors invite the anonymous addressee/candidate into a conversation, and in so doing, pioneer a dialogic thinking about the meanderings of training.
At first glance, the epistolary style brought to (my) mind Laclos's Dangerous liaisons. Indeed, in Dear Candidate, the reader finds the dramatic twists and turns of the candidate's life. Yet, this collection is first and foremost a work of deep generosity, care and thoughtful reflection, written with honesty, empathy, humour and love for our field.1 As importantly, the collection awaits answers from its reader - the candidate. This invitation to respond posits the “candidate” as the becoming analyst, both held in mind as the addressee, as well as present as an internal figure in the mind of the seasoned analyst. Most immediately, psychoanalysis is framed as a field that coalesces temporalities and generations, as well as processes of externalization and internalization. In some sense, the genre of the collected letters captures the meaning of becoming analyst insofar as Dear Candidate can be said to belong to the epistolary style only once the candidate writes a response.
Busch also “felt it wise to not put the letters in any categories or order, and therefore the letters are presented pretty much as I received them.” One of the r