George E. Gallahorn, M.D.

There is very little current information in the psychoanalytic literature regarding psychoanalytic clinical education. It is not easy to single out the one most difficult aspect of teaching candidates the clinical skills of psychoanalysis. It may be helpful, however, to consider some of the problems that arise in the clinical teaching of continuing case seminars and clinical conferences in which someone (most often a candidate) presents process notes from his or her work with a particular analytic patient.

In my opinion, many of the problems that develop are due to the idealization of all aspects of psychoanalysis—the theory, teachers and supervisors, and the training analyst. This idealization leads the candidates to not question psychoanalytic theory in any rigorous way, including the theory of technique. Rather, they hope to find the answers to developing their clinical skills in books and journal articles. When there are not sufficiently satisfactory answers to be found through reading, the candidates then go to teachers and supervisors. They want the teachers, whom they see as omniscient, to provide specific answers to a clinical problem that usually has no definitive answer. Finally, candidates may attempt to solve the problem by imitating the methods of their idealized training analyst. Naturally, there are other factors involved in a candidate imitating his or her training analyst, such as conflicts about competition.

Some teachers are reluctant to give up their idealization of psychoanalysis. They will respond to the candidates' questions as if there are definitive answers which are then given by the teacher to the students, or they will refer the trainees to the analytic literature. Also, if a teacher is aware that a candidate is imitating his or her training analyst, the instructor may be uncomfortable about raising any questions about the student's solution to the clinical problem.

The various idealizations by candidates often are accompanied by a denial of