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This paper was presented to the 2nd Pre-Congress Conference on Training, Copenhagen, 1967. It was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49 (6) , with the sub-heading ‘The goals of psychoanalytic education and the criteria for the evaluation of applicants’.
When I was pondering about Dr Kohut’s invitation to prepare this paper, my task appeared to me in three images: if the paper was to facilitate and stimulate discussion, it should have the characters of a basis backcloth. As a basis, the paper would provide a solid communication with the work already done on these problems and so secure coherence with the past; as a framework, it would protect discussion from spilling over the necessary boundaries—a risk with which we are all familiar since we have been trained to free association. The image of the back-cloth is taken from the theatre, the ‘boards that represent the world’, and what it expresses is the opposite of the former concept of boundary. The back-cloth on the stage suggests the continuation of the events depicted in the foreground, a continuation that extends far beyond our actual range of vision and ends in the infinite. In other words, I saw the functions of this paper as starting off with information about the already existing views and definitions of the goals of psychoanalytic education and the correlated criteria for evaluation—hence the bibliography which Kohut added to his letters before the PreCongress. Such information should be factually correct, well-ordered, systematic, and integrative. We have a model of such information in Greenacre’s admirable digest . Unfortunately, to follow this model is beyond my abilities, and I shall make no attempt to present a critical digest of the relevant literature since 1961. Instead I shall discuss some works related to our topic and select certain concepts that I find important or that formed the starting point for significant developments, or that recur frequently without having