Observations of a Training Analyst

Twenty-six years ago I was appointed training analyst in the newly opened Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin. This has remained my chief occupation throughout the vicissitudes of my existence. Neither the lapse of time nor my special opportunities for collecting experience are in themselves sufficient justification for the following observations. The experience of an analyst—and I suspect it is the same with every experience beyond mere routine—is not a simple coefficient of the duration in time and of the amount of material studied. The truth can be sometimes acquired in a flash of insight, whereas the ways of error may lead further astray the longer they last.

It should be recorded that at the time I began to do training analysis, this institution was still in its experimental stage. The demand that the analyst be analyzed was theoretically acknowledged, but it had not yet been tried, and it was impossible to foresee whether it was feasible, and if so, it was not known how, when or by whom it should be done. My initiation into the new vocation coincided with its general development around me; far from being based on precedents and strictly prescribed, it was still inchoate and receiving its definition by a coöperation in which the foremost analysts of the period participated. I had the advantage of comparing my experiences and discussing them with Freud, Ferenczi, Abraham, Rank, Eitingon, Rado and Reik.

I was, moreover, given an unusual opportunity to make comparative studies of both training and therapeutic analyses. This came about through none of my doing. Before the Institute in Berlin was started I had practiced general analysis in Switzerland. At that time the 'training candidate' did not exist. Later,