A Training Analysis for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists*

There has been a developmental lag in the training of psychoanalytic psychotherapists. The most important aspect of this lag is the frequent failure to require or include a personal or a training analysis in professional training programs. This is so for historic reasons that will be discussed below. For the purpose of this paper, no distinction will be made between a personal analysis and a training analysis (see De Blencourt, 1983).

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is here defined as those therapies based exclusively on psychoanalytic theory, but using modifications in the analytic situation, such as reduced frequency or sitting up, and/ or deviations from psychoanalytic technique, such as the use of suggestion and various supportive or “ego building” techniques. Within the framework of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, there is some variation in approach or emphasis (ego psychology, object relations theory, conflict theory, deficit theory, etc.) just as there is in psychoanalysis (Wallerstein, 1988).

I believe that psychoanalytic psychotherapy is the long-neglected and denigrated branch of the psychoanalytic family partly because psychoanalysis has had a long struggle in establishing its separate identity, at first from derivative schools of psychoanalysis (Adler, Jung, Homey, etc.), and later from the eclectic psychotherapy of American “dynamic psychiatry.” However, the importance of psychoanalytic