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Implicit in this book, perhaps coming into focus as it proceeds, is a certain vision of psychoanalysis and what it means to be an analyst. This, in turn, raises questions about what is involved in becoming one, and this final chapter is an extended consideration of the nature of psychoanalytic training.
The apparently straightforward idea, that to be a psychoanalyst one must become one, carries more implications, and is more debatable than may appear at first sight. Becoming something that, to begin with, one is not, amounts to a change in who one is: a development in one’s identity. Not everyone, however, would view psychoanalytic training from this perspective. It can also be seen as a matter of learning to do something; to understand and make use of a particular conceptual framework, and to carry out a particular kind of practice. This lends a different quality, and different sort of energy to the training situation. In fact, both attitudes are necessary, and they exist in a necessary tension with each other.
This chapter ranges widely over many topics. What gives direction to its apparent meandering is the idea that the specifically and essentially psychoanalytic quality of analytic training resides in the developmental, not the didactic, aspect of it. Of course, those wanting to be analysts have a lot of learning to do, as growing children have much to learn about the world and how to live in it. Candidates have to learn how analytic concepts are used, and what good analytic practice consists of. But you cannot teach a child to grow up, and you cannot teach someone to be a psychoanalyst: it is a question of helping them to become one.
In the early days of psychoanalysis, training was not systematised. Indeed, the concept of training barely existed. In 1910, Freud’s answer to the question of how to become a psychoanalyst was: ‘By studying one’s own dreams’ (Freud, 1910a: 33). A significant milestone was the idea of a ‘training analysis’. Two years after the remark