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When I first read Joyce's Ulysses, I remember encountering a critic's remark that it was not a book to be read for the first time. That the same is true of conducting an analysis makes the process of undergoing a psychoanalytic education an exciting and challenging, but also frustrating and uncomfortable experience. The candidate, like that first-time reader, suffers the anxiety and perplexity of groping through the opening phase without a knowledge of termination, wandering about in a not yet familiar landscape attempting to make sense of the terrain.
The official structure of psychoanalytic education offers to the candidate three forms of guidance for this odyssey: supervision, classes, and the personal analysis. I was asked to consider how these forms of guidance, separately and in interaction with each other, contributed to my becoming a psychoanalyst. An analysis of one's psychoanalytic education—“to know what one knows and how one knows it” (Benedek and Fleming, 1966, p. 11)—is not a simple matter. In struggling to delineate what transformations had taken place or were taking place and from what direction, I was reminded of a similar question posed to me during an application interview for psychoanalytic training: “What have you learned from your psychoanalysis and how?” That I would answer that question differently today than I did then is not merely because of the inevitable emergence of additional material in the ensuing years of analysis. More crucially, it is because what I know now has reorganized what I knew then.