Joint Meetings of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Psychoanalytic Societies

January 20, 1949. THE RÔLE OF IDENTIFICATION IN PSYCHIATRIC AND PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING. Martin Grotjahn, M.D.

Contrary to the often repeated statement that there are few or no differences between therapeutic and training analyses, Grotjahn directs attention to some important differences which should be studied so that they may be properly utilized or eliminated. Identification is a part of every analysis, but it is more complex when it develops between one physician and another than between a physician and a patient. There is a reality identification, stemming from the fact that the student wishes to become an analyst. It is a partial, testing identification, and the student willing to learn will have to integrate the behavior pattern growing out of it. The student's identification in the transference, on the other hand, is a neurotic, repetitive, ambivalent phenomenon. Its analysis calls for no technical devices that are not already known, but it demands of the analyst a special alertness and freedom from blind spots in his relation to his colleagues, because of the frequency with which the negative aspects of the identification are isolated, projected upon another analyst of the group, and acted out. Any sign of identification