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It is certainly not breaking news that the system in which most psychoanalysts receive their training is made needlessly complex and problematic by many contradictions and oddities that are built into it. We are perhaps unique among the helping and scholarly professions in not only providing a didactic education to our students, but requiring them to undergo a very personal and extensive experience of therapy, an analysis that is preferably voluntary, as part of their training. Inevitably, the training analysis is heavily burdened. The analysts are senior colleagues of their analysands, and the inevitable extra-analytic contact affects the transference and countertransference. Not infrequently, the duration of analysis is not determined freely but must meet an external standard, such as the expectation that it will continue until most of the control work is completed. The analytic experience takes place within an institute, a context that compromises privacy, and in which the analysis may be impacted by the rivalries, judgments, career issues, and intense relationships that are always present.
Furthermore, because the analyst and analysand will have continuing contact after termination, the ending is often skewed and incomplete. Training analyses are not intended merely to relieve suffering (a daunting task in itself), but also nurture the candidate's “psychoanalytic identity” (American Psychoanalytic Association, 1999).
Adding to the complexity of this didactic/therapeutic training process is the unique figure of the training analyst that we have placed at its center. Chosen as putatively superior analysts, these colleagues may evidence great power within an institute that in my view is structured as an oligarchy, pervaded by the transferences of current and former analysands and their analysts, all within a matrix of transferences toward Freud and his brainchild, our profession.
Because of these transferences, psychoanalytic training, practice, and theory making crea