Chapter 9 The Coming Changes in Psychoanalytic Education: Part I1

Mary Target (2001), in her comprehensive review of the literature on psychoanalytic education, points to a recent increase in papers on this issue in contrast to earlier times, attributing this change to an inhibition that gradually was overcome. While highly critical analyses of psychoanalytic education emerged from the very beginning (Bálint, 1948; Bernfeld, 1962), a majority of the early papers were descriptive, and usually affirmed the validity of the Eitingon training model prevalent throughout the international community related to the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), as highlighted by the classical work of Lewin and Ross (1960) and Joan Fleming (Fleming, 1961; Fleming & Benedek, 1966). It was not until the 1970s that critical analyses of the organizational structure implicit in the Eitingon model and of the educational programs of psychoanalytic institutes began to dominate the respective literature: a critique that is now, by far, the dominant trend in the corresponding contributions: Arlow, 1969, 1972; Bruzzone et al., 1985; Davidson, 1974; Dulchin & Segal, 1982; Greenacre, 1966; Kairys, 1964; Keiser, 1969; Lifschutz, 1976; Szasz, 1958.

From early on, criticism of psychoanalytic education focused on dysfunctional aspects involving the selection of candidates, the criteria for graduation, the nature of psychoanalytic seminars and supervision, and particularly the authoritarian consequences of

the training analysis system and the excessive bureaucratization of training. In the 1980s and 1990s this critique turned its focus to the underlying structural and organizational problems in psychoanalytic education and their historical antecedents (Bruzzone et al., 1985; Cooper, 1990, 1997; Dulchin & Segal, 1982; Giovannetti de Freitas, 1991; Green, 1991; Infante, 1991; Kernberg, , , 2000, 2001a, 2001b; Köpp et al., 1990; Lussier, 1991; Roustang, 1982; Wallerstein, 1993).