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Dr. Dorn's paper deserves serious attention, particularly to its recommendations of self-scrutiny without moral exhortation or partisan polemics.
Bernfeld has described how flexible Sigmund Freud was in matters of psychoanalytic education; he had a smile for the efforts at streamlining psychoanalytic education first introduced in Berlin. The early participants in the psychoanalytic movement were heroic and enthusiastic
discoverers swimming against the current in medicine and public opinion. Their commitment to psychoanalysis was not dictated by opportunism but sprang from spontaneous dedication to Freud's ingenious discoveries.
The present student of psychoanalysis in the United States no longer has to face many external attacks. He is able to profit from the great need for psychotherapy and from the popularity and prestige that Freudian psychoanalysis particularly has gained in this country.
But this very popularity has conjured up internal tensions. Poorly motivated therapists may use the dependency needs of their patients for easy egocentric gratifications. The expansion of psychotherapeutic needs has forced the American Psychoanalytic Association to institutionalize training to keep its membership purified from “wild psychoanalysis.” But institutionalization necessarily mobilizes regressive trends of infantilizing submission to authoritative leadership or deviations by “rebels without cause.”
The pillars of training are courses, seminars and supervision. The personal analysis does not fit into the institutional frame with its quantifying standards which may not meet the personal needs of the student. The confidentiality and privacy of a personal analysis is not guaranteed when the training analyst is a member of the education committee which makes decisions about the student's promotions or demotions even if he does not participate in the voting about such decisions concerning his own student's career. (Hans Sachs, a non-medical training analyst and pioneer in ps