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To outline the history of modern psychoanalytic training over the last four decades includes the birth and development of modern psychoanalysis itself. But to begin at the very beginning: Freud stated that he considered psychoanalysis to be any line of investigation that takes as its starting point transference and resistance. Most psychoanalysts now would also include the investigation of the countertransference and of emotional communication between patient and analyst, analyst and patient.
Freud and his first followers were pessimistic about psychoanalysis ever being applicable to the study or treatment of what have come to be known as the narcissistic neuroses. Still, Freud seems to have been of the opinion that psychoanalysis would be a living, growing entity as long as someone was interested in it. His position was that psychoanalysis is not a child of speculation, but rather the product of experience, and for that reason unfinished. He invited anyone to study it and to help in its future development. So the door was left open for future researchers to expand the applicability of psychoanalysis, which we have done-particularly, but not only, in the direction of the narcissistic disorders.
The specific body of advances in theory and technique which received the name of modern psychoanalysis arose in the other half of this century, initially as the observations, thoughts, and feelings of one analyst interested in working with schizophrenics. In the mid-1940s, that analyst began to help others to learn to work analyticaly with severely regressed, narcissistic patients. What was born of that effort is now a central current in the mainstream of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and training.