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This volume is a public record of the American Psychoanalytic Association's 1974 conference on what the subtitle terms the current situation and future possibilities of psychoanalytic education. Because I was not a participant and did not read its voluminous material, the conference is known to me only through this book, a representation made easy by Stanley Goodman's editing. The conference involved one hundred and sixty-eight invited analysts deployed into nine "commissions," each asked, well in advance, to study and report on a different aspect of analytic training. These nine reports and the discussion they stimulated at the four-day conference became the basis for the nine principal chapters of the book.
The first chapter, "Tripartite System of Psychoanalytic Education," is also first in importance, its title referring to the three essential elements of psychoanalytic education: training analysis, courses, and supervised analysis. I am puzzled that this commission did not use its opportunity to attempt to create a bold, viable analytic prototype that might have spread its coordinating image throughout the conference. An impossible task, to be sure, but an account of how and why the attempt failed might have led to an exciting, challenging, entirely pertinent contribution. Instead, the commission seemed to lean toward brief and conclusive statements regarding secondary considerations. The following are a few examples from the portion on training analysis.
On whether training analysis should continue to be required, the answer comes across as a short and easy "Yes." On the difficulties contributed to the training analysis by the training analyst, the response seems firm that this factor is overemphasized. On problems caused by the analysis being conducted in an institute setting, the answer is brief—problems thus caused are not insurmountable and may even be constructive. Unfortunately, concise responses offer little access to the arguments that led to t