Introduction

The present volume is a result of fifty years of experience and concern with the nature of psychoanalytic education. I trained as a psychoanalyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Chilean Psychoanalytic Association, in Santiago, Chile, under the inspired, charismatic, and creative leadership of Ignacio Matte Blanco, from 1951 to 1961. I joined the Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, in 1961, where I followed advanced psychoanalytic studies and eventually became a training and supervising psychoanalyst in 1966. I then experienced still a new psychoanalytic environment and culture, upon moving to New York in 1973. At that point, I joined the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society, and the Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research at the Department of Psychiatry of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. By the time I finally settled, as a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research, I had experienced three or four significantly different centers of psychoanalytic education. This experience evolved further when, as part of my professional and research activities in psychoanalysis as well as in psychiatry, and as part of my interest in the study and research on personality disorders, I was privileged to obtain views of psychoanalytic institutions in Europe, North and South America.

It was a profoundly educative, stimulating and inspiring universe of experiences, but also the source of growing concern over problems with psychoanalytic education and the destiny of psychoanalysis in our time, that originated my interest in studying these problems and in attempting to contribute to the solutions of some of them.

Gradually, deep concerns for the future of psychoanalysis as a science and a profession became central in these efforts. Psychoanalysis as a fundamental contribution to the culture of the twentieth century seemed t