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It would be difficult even for one not a psychoanalyst to say too much in praise of the recently published study of psychoanalytic education in the United States by Bertram D. Lewin and Helen Ross (5). Familiar with a number of comprehensive studies of professional and graduate education in several fields, I know of few, if any, so thorough yet modest about facts, objective and self-critical in their interpretation, learned in the context in which facts and interpretation are viewed, and appreciatively but critically aware of the unique and indigenous elements in the subject of their inquiry.
The result is that psychoanalytic education looks pretty good to the outsider. It is not, as the study wisely remarks, 'the ideal school which will remedy all previous educational deficiencies' as combination of 'Utopian academy plus garden plus stoa plus Pasteur Institute' (5, p. 332). But whatever may still be wrong with it, as a whole it looks good. Its vitality is great, as witness the number of students in course almost approaching the total number of practicing analysts. Its standards are high on all the matters regarded as basic. Its administration and execution is plainly improving all the time. Its educational know-how, as uniquely relevant to its subject matter, is obviously large and growing. In its increasing relationships with other educational enterprises and institutions (medical, psychiatric, etc.), it is finding what churches have long since discovered—that an alert missionary program strengthens rather than weakens the home base.
Since the book usefully includes some material on the history of psychoanalytic education, the outside reader is struck by a kind of Cinderella, or Little Orphan Annie, thread in this history. Freud had to start psychoanalysis, and then psychoanalytic education, without supportive institutional relationships