Early Thinking: The Training Process Develops

Psychoanalysts have been complaining for years that the classroom does not contribute as much to the development of analysts as does personal analysis and supervision, that adequate training takes at least a decade, that candidates learn more through case supervision after graduation than before, and according to Price, that transference to an institute and its faculty may actually block learning.

While psychoanalysis itself has grown and changed, the teaching of children has also taken on new dimensions. Modern analysts felt that the method of training psychoanalysts could benefit from new concepts in childhood education. The founders of the modern analytic movement were practicing psychoanalysts trained, with one or two exceptions, by Hyman Spotnitz, a neurologist and psychiatrist who had been researching the treatment of schizophrenia and the other severe disorders.

In 1971, twenty analysts from the Theodor Reik Institute met to found a training center dedicated to these new principles of teaching; they scheduled a two-lecture series entitled “Techniques of Modern Psychoanalysis and Modern Psychoanalytic Theory” to introduce to the mental health community techniques for working with narcissistic patients. The lecturers were trained in modern analytic theory and had been teaching at psychoanalytic institutes, conducting workshops and courses at universities, and leading professional conferences on average for twenty years. The lecture series was a first step in the development of organized modern psychoanalytic teaching. In eight lectures, Hyman Spotnitz presented innovations in psychoanalytic techniques; ten psychoanalysts