Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training. By Moustapha Safouan; Translated and introduced by Jacqueline Rose. New York:  St. Martin's Press, 2000,  v +  132 pp.

Prior to the 1970s, there was a general consensus in this country as to the description and definition of psychoanalysis as theory and practice. As a science of mind, positivist notions of history, knowledge, and truth provided the largely unquestioned assumptions for psychoanalytic theory; correspondence theory, rules, and evidence constructed an objective framework for the collection and understanding of data in analytic practice. As a discipline, psychoanalysis rested on conceptual foundations having their genesis in biology, their development in medicine, and their validation from the methods and assumptions of the natural sciences. And there was little, if any, “Question of Psychoanalytic Training” in the United States. A science- and pathology-driven model of knowing and understanding human being-ness provided our organizing conceptualization of the purpose, the content, and the institutional format of our pedagogic enterprise. Infused with a medical ideology, psychoanalytic training was organized around the image of the analyst as a mental health professional who thought in terms of diseases, disorders, and deficiencies; listened to his/her patients through the organizing conceptual framework of symptomatology, etiology, and psychopathology; and intervened in the interests of normalizing and repairing.

Combined with a strong influence from psychoanalysis in Europe and elsewhere, an epistemological awakening in the analytic culture during the past quarter of a century has changed the very concept and meaning(s) of psychoanalysis as theory and practice. Contemporary psychoanalysis is characterized by a rich and creative pluralism in conceptualization and theory. The more contemporary psychologies of psychoanalysis premise different understandings as to the basic nature of people, posit different methods of knowing about people, and assume different purposes, objectives, and understandings of the analytic discourse. Nevertheless, the structure of our institutions