Discussion of Robert M. Dorn's Article, Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Education: What Kind of “Journey”?

Postgraduate training in psychoanalysis has moved into an ever increasing degree of organization within the individual institutes and within the American Psychoanalytic Association. As compared with most postgraduate training in this country, the analytic institutes are more rigid within themselves and their national organization than are, for example, the various medical schools or their allied organizations.

The Association of American Medical Colleges, for instance, leaves entirely to each medical college its method of teaching, accepts its graduates, etc. Its standards are general, not specific, whereas in the American Psychoanalytic Association, although each training facility is “certified,” each graduate must have his training examined for eligibility for membership. This in turn has set up multiple allied problems about which, with the increase in organization within the institutes and in the parent body, there has been an inordinate amount of growing discussion about them.

There have been a variety of papers on such topics as curriculum, supervisory process, character structure of the applicants, vicissitudes of personal therapeutic analysis of trainees under institute auspices, selection process, and problems relating to the analyst's role in an institute at an operational level. In the 1960's, particularly, the roles of the psychoanalytic institutes, of the psychoanalytic societies, the relations between individual psychoanalysts and between various societies have been openly discussed.

Dr. Dorn has undertaken to include all of these previously discussed problems in his current paper. Apart from implied need for certain changes, the result is to raise questions as to whether some of the emotional patterns explored are capable of change since all of the factors mentioned cannot be explained by psychodynamics.

For example, Dr. Dorn asks why we choose such unfavorable situations for training analysis, referring to the existing pattern of preparatory analysis coi