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Charles Baekeland’s case, during the time he was a candidate, helps elucidate the quandary surrounding how we learn and what we attempt to teach. The additional problem that Charles’ case presents us with is how we teach the specifics of analytic thinking and technique when the cases candidates have during their training are “difficult.” Then the pain of the patient and the terrors and anxieties they bring into the clinical setting become an additional conundrum for candidates, supervisors, and institutes.
In an attempt to focus on the analyst-candidate at work, the endeavor is more complicated than looking at how an analyst “works.” A candidate work is in hopefully an evolutionary process, developed and developing at the same time. Thus, trying to think about the analyst’s internal working model, one may find a less stable, more flexible, or more rigid way of approaching clinical material. The influences of some unknowns, such as the candidates’ analysis, particular supervisors, and seminars all make the task we have here more complex. Yet we start with the basic assumption that the analyst-candidate and patient are involved in an analysis and analytic endeavor.
Candidates’ control cases have the great benefit of having two thoughtful clinicians looking at material over a long period of time. There is the luxury of observing, learning, and changing while having an additional “mind” helping them. It can also be confusing, and disorienting for all three participants as well. This is in addition to the fourth person involved, the analyst, and the institution as well.
Different theories of the mind, different characters, all approaching the material but not all for the same purpose, come together. The patient needs and wishes to get better, be less frightened, despairing, terrified of anxieties. The supervisor wishes to help the candidate learn to be an analyst. The candidate desires and needs to learn to do analysis. Patients disrupt us, tax us, and unsettle us as we lea