Discussion

This is a timely publication, reflecting the growing awareness in the psychoanalytic community that psychoanalytic education faces serious problems in its organizational characteristics, its role in the development of psychoanalysis as a science, and the unresolved challenges to developing broad applications of psychoanalytic theory and practice to a wider spectrum of emotional illness.

The articles may be divided into two groups: those that deal with general problems of educational methods and institutional structure, and those others that focus on a specific aspect of psychoanalytic education, particularly supervision and the experiment of “shuttle” analysis. Deborah Cabaniss' article “Becoming a School: Developing Learning Objectives for Psychoanalytic Education” is a lucid introduction to the general problem facing psychoanalysis today. Her conclusion, in previous research, that the absence of clear guidelines for progression and graduation compromises psychoanalytic training, now leads her to the general thesis that “educational research suggests that learning objectives and clear assessment tools can help to demystify education, guide curriculum development, clarify standards for the fields, and prompt research.” She stresses that the first step in the assessment of whether educational goals are achieved is the need for clear learning objectives, and explicit formulations of the ways in which students are expected to be changed by the educative process. She quotes Tyler in emphasizing that learning objectives have to include both a behavioral aspect and a content aspect, and proposes to implement these objectives as they apply to psychoanalytic education: first, identifying desired results; second, determining the acceptable evidence, and third, spelling out a plan of learning experiences and instruction leading to those results and the corresponding evidence. Cabaniss illustrates the application of these principles with the work of the Columbia Task Force on P