The Selection and Function of the Training Analyst in Europe

In 1918 at the Fifth Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association held immediately after World War I in Budapest, Dr Hermann Nunberg introduced the revolutionary idea that in the future every person wanting to become an analyst should himself or herself have been analysed. Yet, although most analysts present at the Budapest Congress thought this could never be realized, within a short time it became quite unthinkable that anyone who aspired to become an analyst could do so without undergoing an 'instructional' analysis. Seven years later in 1925, at the Ninth International Congress in Bad Homburg, Dr Max Eitingon made another controversial plea. He now proposed the introduction of required and regular supervisions of analyses being conducted by student analysts. In his main speech to invited delegates from all Branch Societies (as they were called at the time) he linked his plea for supervision with the belief that it was only by taking full responsibility for the training of prospective analysts that the future of psychoanalysis could be guaranteed. With this purpose in mind, he suggested the establishment in each country of Institutes specially concerned with training. He said 'It is the duty of our Association to be ceaselessly diligent in maintaining and developing that which Freud has created, to guide it from a premature fusion and so-called synthesis with other fields of thought and different methods of investigation and work, and ever to give clear definition to that which is specifically our own. Now the fate of our work is in the hands of our successors, and it is to them more and more that we must turn our attention. We must endeavour to meet this our most pressing need by making suitable provision.'

More than half a century after Nunberg's and Eitingon's recommendations there is still the same concern for the quality of psychoanalytic training and for the future of psychoanalysis. But the situation is rather different now. W