Based on a clinical study of institutional training, the authors raise questions about the state of French psychiatry. Demonstrating that professionals are suffering from a collective psychical breakdown that has already taken place, in the Winnicottian sense, without having been experienced, they argue that it is necessary to support a group process of symbolization within training settings. By analysing the defences and resistance to psychoanalysis in these spaces, they are able to call on underlying theoretical models (transitional analysis, the nostalgic-melancholic position and transitional subversion), while at the same time demonstrating the need to rely on the group nature of the analysts involved and their ability to re-establish links within the institutions. The construction of a framework that is no longer self-evident in a training practice that has become a clinical experience of trauma, is examined in the same way as the recourse to history, art and culture.