Psychoanalytic Education in the Twenty-First Century: A Syllabus for all Seasons

You are right from your side, and I am right from mine We're just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind

How do we teach psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century? How do we come to grips with the pluralistic spread of alternate theories of mind which have proliferated at an increasingly viral rate since the early 1980s, when the relational turn challenged the inherent efficacy of the traditional forms of psychoanalysis?

Increasingly, the mainstream psychoanalytic literature has been addressing aspects of psychoanalytic education; however, the institutional habits of most training facilities have shown a distinct lag in the implementation of changes that have been suggested in the literature Levy (2009).

It would appear that the very nature of paradigms has been misunderstood by a majority of those within the broader psychoanalytic community. Since Freud's death, the lack of a true transference figure, that is, a paternal authority, has left the field at the mercy of an evolutionary process, lacking the grounding necessary for an orderly progression of theory building, which in turn would lay the further groundwork for a distinct shift in paradigmatic progression (, personal communication). During Freud's life, he was able to promote exploration in psychoanalysis, but without him multiple leaders showing intolerance