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.
As the American Psychoanalytic Association and local institutes struggle to redefine themselves and to reexamine their methods for determining psychoanalytic competence, this book makes a timely appearance. Its author, a seasoned training analyst, has changed and enlarged his theoretical perspectives over time. As a member of the Israeli Psychoanalytic Institute, he has also been part of the debates surrounding recent innovations there. His experiences have led him to label psychoanalytic training “exciting and gratifying … conflict ridden, complex” and “impossible” (p. 2), by which I take him to mean unfixed and always in need of change and reexamination. His years of teaching and supervising have culminated in a theory of psychoanalytic education based on a relational perspective.
Berman feels strongly that in order to approach a theory of analytic education, one must know its history. The first part of this book, therefore, is devoted to the early development of relational theory through an examination of the differences between Freud and Ferenczi, Klein and Winnicott. The historical account is compelling and the section on the development of relational analysis in America, well described (though essentially old ground for many readers). Furthermore, the link between this history and current issues of psychoanalytic education is not clearly established. While Berman states that he is not in favor of theoretical schools of thought that foment divisiveness, his own historical account is clearly biased in favor of a relational point of view. Ferenczi and Winnicott are cast as heroes struggling against the more narrow, rigid authoritarianism of Freud and Klein. While this is true in many ways, his is an oversimplified account. And when Berman describes