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The psychoanalytic literature reflects a slow but steady expression of concern regarding the politics of power in psychoanalytic organizations. In general, this concern has been centered on two main issues: (a) problems and complexities of the training analysis and its long-range effects on the organizational life of our institutes and (b) the inherently subjective nature of the clinical data of psychoanalysis and the epistemic anxiety (John Kerr, this issue) to which it contributes.
With regard to the first point, Freud himself was initially hesitant to agree to the training analyst model and only reluctantly did so after his cancer was diagnosed and he was confronted by the prospect of his own mortality (Bernfeld, 1962; Roazen, 2002). With regard to the second, Kirsner (2000), in his study of psychoanalytic institutes, turned repeatedly to the complications that follow from our reluctance to acknowledge the weak evidentiary basis for the “truths” of psychoanalysis.
Answers to questions about the nature of the self, the mind, emotions, relationships, and human nature are not quantifiable, or easily classified and standardised. They are often experiential, subjective, uniquely individual, interpersonal and philosophical. The nature of this complex field is suffused with uncertainty and ambiguity.… Psychoanalysts make claims to therapeutic knowledge and their institutions qualify practitioners. But … the claim to knowledge implied by qualification is far greater than the real level of knowledge [pp. 232-233].
The inherent uncertainty and ambiguity of analytic knowledge, Kirsner argued, lead to several unconscious defensive strategies, such as the substitution of “annointment” and analytic filiation and lineage for more objective and quantifiable demonstrations of analytic competence. These strategies, which function as social defenses