A Dynamic Outline of the Training Situation

I should like to introduce our topic by surveying some of its essential features in broadest outline, to give a kind of map of the regions with which our Society, and especially the professional committee,1 is most concerned. This concern exists because our methods of selection and the training of future members of our professional body must in the last analysis be indicative of its aims. Therefore we are constantly trying to learn, from our past experience as trainees, and now as analysts, supervisors, and seminar leaders.

Although we are, or hope to be, a learned society, we are nevertheless subject to certain laws which affect all social organizations and these have to do with such mundane things as power. It so happens that there are few psychiatrists in practice now to whom it would not be of advantage to claim that they have had an analytical training, and to those non-medical colleagues who work in the field of psychotherapy the advantages of being recognized as analysts are even more obvious. It follows that those who are in a position to bestow such recognition wield a great deal of power. It therefore behoves us to remain mindful of Lord Acton's famous words concerning the corrupting force of power, and this applies to each training analyst as an individual as well as to the corporate body. Whether power is recognized as a motivating force or not, it certainly is a factor in all social organizations. It seems a fact that each successive generation tends to establish ever more exacting criteria of selection and acceptance into the organization as long as advantages accrue from being admitted.

I belong to the first generation of trainees in the Society to whom anything like a structured training programme was presented, and remember very well when I became aware that none of the training analysts of those earlier days had had any proper training in the sense of what we were then about to receive. Since those earlier days efforts have been made to lay down defi