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In this issue we publish a symposium, held in the London Society for Analytical Psychology, on the training of analysts.
The symposium was subsequently circulated to other training centres both in the United States of America and in Zürich; a number of replies were received, many of them informal and not for publication. Only a comment by Dr. Edinger followed by a short reply by one of the symposiasts appears here, though it is hoped to continue the discussion in later issues of this journal. The letters not published were, however, of sufficient interest to warrant an editorial note which at the same time aims to give perspective to the discussion and define some of the areas of agreement and disagreement.
It is clear that the important subject of training analysts in analytical psychology is receiving considerable attention in all the centres circulated but that methods of training are not yet sufficiently defined or organized to make definite statements about them.
In London there has been commitment to a definite policy which has been persisted in even though it has been subject to constant critical assessment. This may be one reason why the London Society have felt able to take the initiative in publishing some of their ideas. But the fact that their training was the first to start, after discussion of it with Professor Jung and Miss Toni Wolff in 1946, must also have contributed.
The proposals then put forward differed in some respects from the training procedures previously employed by Jung himself. Perhaps by temperament, but more because of his idea of individuation, he had laid stress on the individual, and there grew up a trend in analytical psychology to maintain that, because of the importance of the individual dialectic between analyst and patient, techniques in the formal sense were to be eschewed. As a consequence, training in skills became, if not undesirable, at least a procedure to be used with considerable circumspection. The other trend which is app