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Ever since its placement as one of the fundaments of our traditional psychoanalytic educational system, which was established by Max Eitingon and his colleagues in Berlin in 1920, not far from a century ago, the training analysis (or personal analysis, or Lehr Analyse as it has variously been dubbed) has been the central problematic of our entire institutionalized educational structure. Originally hailed as a logically necessary part of becoming a psychoanalyst, its variously constituted and seemingly irreconcilable essential components, the therapeutic and the educational, dubbed by Bertram Lewin and Helen Ross (1960) the “syncretistic dilemma,” have given rise to persistent and growing efforts to justify it, to alter it (in increasingly substantial ways), or even, in the extreme, to expunge it altogether (except as a voluntary, personal undertaking, totally divorced from the psychoanalytic educational experience).
Though, in one of the earliest sweeping critiques, Michael Balint (1948) expressed his surprise and dismay that there was, to that point, almost no published literature on the problems and deficiencies surrounding the training analysis, despite there being so many discussions—but essentially unpublished—of these issues at the regular meetings of the International Training Commission (ITC) held at the successive IPA Congresses prior to World War II, this situation has over the years changed very dramatically, so much so, that the problems of the training analysis have become the centerpiece of an ever growing consideration in