Training Analysis and Training Analyst Status: Where are We Now?

Training analysis has become the most contentious and most central part of the process of education to become a psychoanalyst. It is the most expensive, time-consuming, difficult and painful part. Because of the confidentiality necessary for openness in analysis, it is also the most difficult part of the educational process to evaluate. Schachter (in press) researched it by asking analysts about how satisfied they had been with their training analyses and whether they had later analyses to deal with issues not sufficiently dealt with in the training analysis. His study remains the landmark in this field. In an attempt to revise the training analyst selection procedure for the New York Freudian Society, I read the history of training analysis and found some startling discussions of how and why the training analysis was invented and adopted by training institutes.

Balint (1954) summarized the history of the first generation of training analysis as follows:

A person interested in Freud's ideas read his works and uses his ideas in understanding his own and other people's unconscious.

This led very soon to traveling to Freud for a short analysis in order to achieve an experiential understanding of repression and of analytic technique in addition to the intellectual one attainable by reading. Pressure from Ferenczi led to lengthening the training analysis so that it lasted at least as long as any therapeutic analysis in order that the analysand both know and be able to control his own character weaknesses. (p. 158)