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Psychoanalytic training was institutionalised 1922 at the Berlin Congress. It was built on the tripartite model: personal analysis as the basis, to get in touch with the method as well as with the influence of the unconscious on everyday as well as professional life; didactic training to learn the theory; and supervision to integrate the experience and theory with the candidate’s personality. It is essential to emphasize that as soon as training becomes organized, it poses trainer and trainees with many problems, such as: What should be the content of a training program; who should be selected for such training, and by whom and according to what kinds of principles; and, last but not least, how is one to find the most productive teaching methods? It is also important to stress that the syncretism of the psychoanalytic education is the problematic combination of roles and functions. The task of the institute is both to educate and cure the trainee. The trainee is thus a pedagogic unit or object of teaching and a therapeutic unit or object of psychoanalytic procedure. The administrator-teacher syncretism places the student in a regression producing infantilizing position.
There are still many different opinions about how to select candidates and organize the curriculum and length of training. To define psychoanalytic talent is difficult; the uncertainty to determine what criteria to use for selection is great. The problematic overlap between personal analysis and training is constantly present. It is also interesting and intriguing that supervision, which is used at all training institutions, is hardly questioned in regard to its usefulness. There are only a few studies about the so-called ill effects of supervision. Training is considered by many to be mainly a process of personal development. In most psychoanalytic institutes, senior analysts, who have gained recognition for their theoretical papers, for their lecturing, or for their large analytic practices, become