III. Reply

Fordham's question is indeed a central one: “How can a training organization provide conditions under which the candidate will arrive at a good assessment of his own capacity to analyse others?” Lectures, seminars, and examinations (are these the “impressive activities”?) do, in part, provide an answer to this question for two reasons. First, training, whether we like it or not, means discipline. The word itself, derived from the Latin trahere (to draw, drag), implies being directed by another in a certain way. Before a candidate can arrive at his own assessment of his capacity, others must train it and assess it. A study programme helps the candidate to discover his ability, to form it, and to evaluate it against standards—and tradition. Second, one's assessment of one's ability comes about primarily through control casework. For this work, knowledge is a necessary condition, though of course not sufficient. Without a study programme, the candidate has scant knowledge upon which to base his judgement of himself, and thus it runs the risk of utter subjectivity, e.g. it may be influenced by intrapsychic dominants (“missionary”, “healer”), by the relation with his training analyst, or even by early therapeutic luck. Until other criteria of selection and self-assessment appear on the training scene—and Fordham offers no alternative suggestions to the “impressive activities” he spurns—an organized programme, for all its sins, fosters a disciplined awareness of what one is doing.

Fordham concludes that training deepens analysis and makes it more transforming, but he errs in believing that this is in contradistinction to what is stated in my first paper under Personal Analysis, where training analysis is described as “more complex, heavier to carry, and more thorough” than personal analysis. I am less optimistic than he when he writes that there is no chance that analysis will become subsidiary to other aspects of training. Evidence from Switzerland and America concerning