You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
There is a manifest and a latent content when an individual presents himself for analysis. The analyst has discovered this distinction in his own analysis and relives it daily in his analytic hours. There is a need to discern these contents early in the process. If we take a theoretically rigorous position, there are only two tenable positions in analysis: either a patient comes into analysis to analyze the formation of his unconscious in all the diverse facts in which it is disguised, including even the wish to be cured of his neurosis; or we have a patient who comes certified as a candidate through an institute. For Cournut, there is an inherent contradiction built into the psychoanalytic process if the latter is called a didactic analysis. An analysis should be classified as didactic only a posteriori. Yet this is made difficult by the titles of training analyst and candidate and by the structure of the system which requires that a didactic analysis be undertaken, rather than an analysis. Thus the didactic analysis constitutes an exception to the distinction between manifest and latent requests. One of the reasons for the institutionalization of a didactic analysis was the wish to avoid theoretical heresy, that is, a nonanalytic reason for analysis. We have come to confuse the temporal requirement that an analyst know his own unconscious before undertaking treatment of others with the qualitative notion of a didactic analysis. The irony in this is that analysts who are the "best analyzed," and thus presumably best able to defend analysis against heresies, have received their training through a didactic analysis, which is a sort of practical heresy. This theoretical error has become ingrained in the movement, guaranteeing a sort of elitism in the institutions, with guaranteed honors and guaranteed clientele for training analysts.