Prologue: The Emergence and Education of the Analytic Mind

As the guest editor of this issue I was given a blank canvas, a blank table of contents. I decided to fill it with a collage of our contributors’ personal projects, individual journeys, both those done alone and those done with others, about which I had been aware and which inspired me. Each of these writers was teaching others about what we call an analytic way of thinking or perhaps an analytic way of being. It is often not our theory, but our way of listening, of thinking and of being, that draws others to analysis, as our students or as our patients.

None of the authors who contributed to this issue seem to have initially felt that what they were doing would be transformative, but I believe that their projects have promoted important changes, and that these could also occur elsewhere as well. I have felt for some time that their work needed a wider audience or perhaps a wider audience needed them. Some of these articles are about how analysts reached outward from their analytic institute to engage an emerging analytic interest in new trainees or to inform and educate other analysts, non-analysts and the larger community. Some of the projects reached inward into the analytic institute to enhance the learning of our therapy students, analytic candidates, members and faculty.

Janet Noonan begins by taking us outside of the analytic institute and into the world of early career therapists who have some desire to go deeper in their work with patients. She asks us about the moment when each of us decided to become a psychoanalyst. She addresses the barriers to analytic training experienced by early career clinicians, and how she and others at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute have overcome some of these. She shares ways in which potential analytic candidates and psychotherapy trainees can become engaged through lectures, and by contact with potential mentors, supervisors, and current trainees. She describes the array of efforts, the obstacles, and the event