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Richard Chessick, a dedicated teacher and supervisor, has set down some reflections and recommendations on how to improve psychotherapy
training for psychiatric residents. He speculates on the reasons why analytic psychotherapy sometimes fails. Because Chessick's viewpoint is that of traditional psychoanalysis, it is not surprising that he regards the student's personal analysis as the cornerstone of his training. In addition, he believes that supervision should be taken much more seriously than is usually the case and makes numerous well-founded suggestions on how this goal might be achieved.
According to Chessick the educational and training process which has become known as “psychoanalytic psychotherapy” is effective in so far as a person (whom unhappily we persist in calling “patient”) remains educable and trainable and the therapist succeeds in creating an emotional climate in which education, training, and growth can flourish. The therapist must also manage (manipulate, if you will) the relationship so that the traumatic experiences that have impeded the patient's education and adaptation are mitigated and the maladaptive patterns of feeling and behavior modified. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be viewed as an after-education which seeks to correct certain faulty patterns of feeling and behavior which have become deeply ingrained in the emotional context of the parent-child relationship. This after-education is facilitated by the capacity that most people have retained to become involved in a close interpersonal relationship. Since, under appropriate conditions, it is possible to re-enact certain conflict patterns learned in the past with contemporary figures who have assumed emotional significance in the present, the possibility exists for using this contemporary relationship as a vehicle to correct the former patterns. Because the therapeutic relationship is a close analogue to the parent-child relationship (though there are important differences), it len