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The coming into being of psychoanalysis as a psychotherapeutic method and as a profession was perhaps as influential as the impact of Freud's ideas in general. Without doubt, various forms of ‘psychotherapy’ existed before Freud, e.g. methods using magnetism, hypnosis, somnambulism, automatic writing, occult and spiritualistic phenomena, not to mention religious forms of the talking cure, shamanism, confession, etc. In many respects, Freud's method (and theory) owe much more to these than has usually been acknowledged. Freud succeeded, however, in creating a unique and particularly appealing synthesis, along with an organizational structure by which theoretical and practical notions could be handed down to others. This simultaneously created strong emotional ties between the persons involved, and thereby laid the foundation for a genealogical network still expanding today.
Freud founded, in other words, a secular profession and organization of psychotherapy that soon occupied center-stage and overshadowed any competing movements (such as the Emmanuel Movement in the United States, to name but one example; cf. Gifford 1997). Psychoanalysis became a professional identity of its own, along with medicine, psychology, neurology, etc., and a considerable number of people eventually devoted their professional lives to it and earned their living from it. Many contemporary forms of psychotherapy have been influenced by psychoanalytic theory and technique (having developed as a direct offspring, as a sideline, or in opposition to it). Moreover, they have also taken over its unique form of training: the future psychotherapist's personal experience of the method he or she will then use on others, and the supervision of the therapist's first cases.
The present form of psychoanalytic training goes back to the ‘tripartite model’ developed in Berlin in 1920: (1) the personal analysis of the future analyst (‘training analysis’), complemented by (2) theoretical courses and seminars, an