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Jurgen Reeder, an experienced Swedish psychoanalytic practitioner, educator, and administrator, has turned his attention to the structure of formal psychoanalytic education within Institutes and arrives at some harsh indictments of the profession and its embedded training practices. Reeder's “study” (probably more accurately an exhaustive review of the psychoanalytic literature on training issues) leads him to several alarming conclusions about the prospects for the profession and to fairly radical recommendations intended to avert his pessimistic forecast.
In the course of this generally well written, but at times excessively wordy and rambling tome, Reeder reviews some fascinating psychoanalytic history and discusses the training analysis and culture of training Institutes in greater detail than I have previously encountered in a single work of this size. Central to and dominating this work is the author's introduction of the concept of “the superego complex”, a construct comprised of both the “professional superego” and the “institutional superego system”. Reeder elegantly relates the development of this superego complex to Oedipal theory as applied to the relationships between candidates, training analysts, other faculty, peers, and the institute itself. As a result of a fundamental “conflict between love and hate” (p. 154), the superego complex in psychoanalysis becomes both a prescriptive and prescriptive entity that simultaneously represents the ideals of the profession and delineates unacceptable practices. Unfortunately, as Reeder views matters, this complex also serves to inhibit the creativity and inventiveness of the young psychoanalyst, and subjects all members of an analytic institute's community to pressures to conform to sometimes projected or imagined “correct practices.” The result, from his analysis, is stultifying circumstances involving “authoritarian training structures, dictatorial training analysts, a general lack of theoretical curiosity, pow