Reflections on Training Analysis

A ‘Symposium On Training’ was published in 1961-62 in the Journal of Analytical Psychology. It was a first attempt to define the complex training situation and to start a discussion about its significance. Plaut, Newton and myself contributed from London and Hillman wrote on ‘Training and the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich’. In the subsequent interchange of ideas Edinger from New York and Bash from Bern made valuable comments. Subsequently (in ) Stone wrote ‘Reflections of an ex-trainee on his training’. This article was discussed by Marshak (1964) from London, who compared his experiences with her own.

These papers revealed such wide variations in the ‘training situation’ at each centre that different behaviour by training analysts would seem inevitable. For instance, though all symposiasts agreed that analysis of the candidate is the central feature of training, there was conflict over its meaning and practice. In my view, analysis could not cover the idea that ‘Training is analysis’ (Hillman, 1962, p. 8), for in this statement ‘analysis’ includes ‘teaching and study’. In London the two are separated as far as possible because each is conceived to be essentially different (cf. Fordham, 1961). There seems no possibility of reconciling this and other differences, which need first clearer definition than they have yet attained. My paper, therefore, is meant as a step in clarification.

It is, I think, startling that none of the authors in the ‘Symposium’ paid much attention to the training analysis. If it is agreed that, however it be conducted and whatever the term covers, its aim is to provide conditions under which the trainee can attain experience which will prove to be the basis of all his future work, it surely ought to be in the centre of the discussion. Hillman's attempt to place it there failed, as I see it, because he widened the definition so that the meaning of the term analysis became obscured. In London, analysis during formal training is conceiv