The Functions of the Training Analysis and the Selection of the Training Analyst

The privilege of presenting this address on the Training Analysis and the Training Analyst constitutes a pleasure and an honour; it also presents a formidable and humbling challenge. It is difficult to find another area in psychoanalysis about which there is less consensus or more controversy. In fact, it is also difficult to find any single facet of the topic about which there is no conflict or controversy, and even the very concept of the training analysis as one of the fundamental elements of psychoanalytic training has been brought into question. In addition, as we know all too well, these debates are hardly characterized by a consistently high level objective and scientific approach; instead, the disputes about the policies, procedures, and philosophy of the Training Analysis become, so frequently, acrimonious,ad hominem, divisive, and destructive. The reasons for this unhappy state of affairs are multiple and complex, and they encompass all of the human frailties to which mankind—and psychoanalysts—are all too vulnerable. These reasons, both intrapsychic and interpersonal, are well known and have been aired so frequently and so widely that their recapitulation here would be superfluous. I would, however, point to a factor which, although well known, has not been accorded the open attention it deserves. I am referring to the fact that, by and large, we know so little and have so painfully little hard clinical data about the psychoanalytic problems and vicissitudes of the training analysis. For one thing, because of the specific peculiarities of the life history of the average psychoanalyst, the career of the average training analyst, qua training analyst, is a relatively brief one, a career during which he or she can analyse only a limited number of candidates; and this tendency is heightened by the fact that in a significant number of training facilities the number of candidates any one training analyst can have in analysis at a given time is prescribe