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Dr. Dorn has written an interesting and provocative paper which brings to attention again many of the unsolved problems of analytic training, and I appreciate the opportunity to comment on it.
It has been my experience that training analysts will give verbal recognition to the distortions induced in candidates' analyses by the training situation but nonetheless find reasons to resist any concrete proposals
aimed at releasing the training analysis from the contaminating shackles of the “school.”
When my paper on the training analysis to which Dr. Dorn kindly refers appeared three years ago, it was greeted with warm approbation from scattered individuals, but more generally it was received either with apathy or outright opposition. I imagine that McLaughlin's more recent paper, which supports the contention that the training analysis should be divorced from the “school,” must have met with a similar reception. Accordingly, I think it is desirable that the analytic community be goaded periodically into facing the fact that the keystone of the training arch is in need of repair.
Sitting in meetings of Institute committees where the problems of the training analysis crop up repeatedly, one is struck by the illogic of the insistence that the training analyst must relay to the administrative bodies what is going on in his candidates' analyses. “How,” it is asked, “can we know how this student is doing if the analyst doesn't report on his analytic progress?” The implication of the question is that even though it may endanger the analysis, reporting cannot be dispensed with.
Yet, if we accept, as everyone does, the central role of the personal analysis in the totality of training, if we agree that an uncontaminated transference is essential to successful analysis, if we concede that the traditional “reporting” system does distort the transference and therefore endangers the analysis—then by all that is reasonable, we should not be saying, “How can we get along without the ana