Personal Reflections on Training

In Our training, which needs to have a broader basis than the mere inculcation of intellectual knowledge, the problem seems to be one of integration; that is, integrating an increase of theoretical knowledge with the other qualities needed in order to form a therapeutic relationship. To my mind one of the central qualities required in therapeutic work is insight. If theory is not integrated by the trainee and related to his personal development, it may be used to blind him to the realities in the interaction between himself and his patient, rather than to elucidate them. I shall be enlarging on this theme later. In order to consider the best ways of helping the integrative process, I think it might be helpful to look at the training in terms of ego development and sado-masochism. In this context I would define a sado-masochistic reaction as one which strives after, or is identified with, an ideal, which then becomes persecutory to the realities in the ego. The result is that the ego takes a masochistic position in relation to the ideal and cannot develop.

I am going to discuss two ideals about analysts which I feel are often implied but never really discussed or defined. The first is the ideal that in order to be an analyst one has worked through one's neurosis and reached a hypothetical state of maturity. The other is an ideal about theoretical knowledge.

To take maturity first: I think that the trainee is in a very vulnerable position in relation to this ideal for a number of reasons but most of all because of the transference. When the candidate embarks on training his conceptions of an analyst are inevitably based upon his own analyst, with partly unconscious assumptions about him in which a parental archetype will be involved. Where there is an archetype there is a quality of omnipotence, and it is this which gives the ideal involved, that is, the “mature analyst” or its equivalent a “good parent”, a potentially destructive power to the ego, and brings the sado-m