Introduction

As You Read This Symposium on Psychoanalytic Training and Supervision I think you will find yourself looking through an unusual window at the current landscape of our field. Asked by the editors of Dialogues to respond to a set of six (and two follow-up) questions about how training has been influenced by various contemporary trends and shifts in the American analytic world, a diverse group of analytic educators responded from their particular institutional perches.1 What our panelists reveal, of course, goes well beyond their wide and interesting range of approaches to creating effective structures for educating candidates. Their differing views of the challenge of training in a diverse, changing analytic world—indeed in their attitudes toward and interpretation of those changes as defined by Dialogues—reveal the wide range of current sensibilities about just what constitutes an “analytic identity,” as well as fascinating hints of the different institutional cultures dotting the American analytic landscape.

Following this excursion through multiple institutional environments, the other part of this issue contains an experience of something closer to live examples, as it were, of these cultural analytic differences and how they might converge on candidates presenting their work in a contemporary, comparative setting. Three analysts of markedly different persuasions give us samples of how they, as supervisors, would typically respond to two “supervisees” who present their work to their “supervisors,” and to us, through substantial case reports.