Discussion

The clinic of the Swedish Psychoanalytic Institute has been assessing and selecting cases thought to be suitable for supervised psychoanalytic treatment by their candidates for more than 10 years. In their paper, Lagerlöf and Sigrell describe the model of selection used by their clinic and argue that the screening of control cases should focus primarily on the prerequisites for the development of a psychoanalytic process. They believe that their task is to provide “optimal preconditions” for psychoanalytic treatment, and they have developed a short questionnaire as a means of evaluating the quality of their work of selection.

The questionnaire that the Swedish candidates are asked to complete on a yearly basis has only three questions: (1) Is the case suitable for supervision? (2) Has an analytic process developed? and (3) Is the analysis terminated? The last question turns out to be the most important one, the authors feel, because it gives some indication about the “overall outcome” of the analysis and because assessors of cases for supervised analyses are especially interested in selecting those patients who will not terminate treatment prematurely. The Clinic of the Swedish Psychoanalytic Institute believes that the quality of the work of selection can be judged by the circumstances of termination. Obviously, they are not reviewing the assessment of individual cases, but rather the general results of the work of an assessment group whose job it is to select cases for supervised analyses. In these circumstances, an overriding concern is the educational needs of the candidates and very early terminations are usually antithetical to