Psychoanalysis is unique among disciplines, not only in the vast proportion of its total deployed organizational energies devoted to its educational and training processes, but even more in the absolute primacy it has historically accorded the educational function (that of training and supervising analyst) over all others, including even over the research function, which is the one most honored and most rewarded in just about every other professional or graduate academic endeavor. At the same time, psychoanalysis has also had a history of continuing self-conscious attention, via recurring intensive reappraisals, to the functioning, to the processes and the outcomes, of all this focused educational preoccupation.
There have been a number of such formal stocktakings over just the past two decades within the American. We had the initiating “Rainbow Report” on the problems and issues of psychoanalytic education, from an officially sponsored nationwide conference of psychoanalytic educators spearheaded by Joan Fleming, in 1955. This was followed by the famous nationwide survey of Bertram Lewin and Helen Ross, culminating in their landmark, book-length report in 1960, “Psychoanalytic Education in the United States.” One of the consequences of this Lewin-Ross survey was the establishment of the standing study committee within our Board on Professional Standards, the Committee on Psychoanalytic Education (COPE), which has conducted ongoing inquiries into most of the important facets of psychoanalytic education. This committee formally reported its activities to our membership in a plenary session at our 1971 Annual Meeting in Washington under the title “Ten Years of COPE: Perspectives in Psychoanalytic Education.” And last in this highlighted accounting, the American held a week long Conference on Psychoanalytic Education and Research (COPER), bringing together over 150 psychoanalytic educators and leaders in Hot Springs, Virginia, in the fall of 1974 after several years of preparatory work. The conference proceedings were published in a book-length report, “Psychoanalytic Education and Research,” edited by Stanley Goodman.
Each of these undertakings has been a thoughtful and searching critique of the problems and issues confronting psychoanalytic education. Each, tapping a diverse array of viewpoints, settings, and resources, was nonetheless able to arrive at a reasonable consensus on the state of health of the psychoanalytic educational enterprise, its areas of achievement and its causes for reasonable satisfaction, as well as a clear enough delineation of the vexing and unsolved problems that need to be addressed more adequately if our growth as a profession and a science is to continue unabated.
The problem, as I see it, and this is my overall impatient, though, I trust, properly-tempered judgment, is that the issues and the dilemmas that we grappled with at the COPER Conference in 1974 were in all essentials not at all different from those presented in the Rainbow Report of 20 years earlier. A number of us who studied the documents from the two conferences side by side were struck that the Rainbow Report could have been substituted almost unaltered for the study reports from the preparatory commissions and the conference proceedings 20 years later.
The many problems that beset our educational endeavors are well enough known and I will only allude to them, actually in the same sequence as discussed at some length in the paper on “The Futures of Psychoanalytic Education,” which I prepared as my presentation for the panel report of the 1971 plenary session on ten years of COPE. These problems include the continuing syncretistic dilemma between the therapeutic function and the training function, and the degree of separateness that can and that should be achieved for the training analysis from decisions about educational progression (with the issue of reporting and non-reporting by training analysts only part of this), and also the other equally thorny syncretistic dilemma between the requirements of simultaneously training for a profession and educating for a science. They include the issues of part-time institutes, our historic model, and full-time institutes, Anna Freud's “ideal institute”; and the problematic relationships of psychoanalysis to clinical and academic psychiatry, to medical school departments of psychiatry, and/or to the wider university world via the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities, with or without the concept promoted so indefatigably by David Shakow of the university-based autonomous psychoanalytic institute as both a scholarly and a clinical training ground. Linked here are issues of multiple pathways into psychoanalysis from both medical and selected, diverse non-medical ranks, of uniform or individually tailer-made curricula, and of multiple educational tracks and multiple career models within analysis, as against the traditional monolithic focus on the prestigious training analyst career ladder. Last in this listing are the continuing serious manpower problem, the decline in relative quantity of our numbers and the increasing array of at least equally attractive and prestigious viable career alternatives in psychiatry; the age problem, the many implications for productivity and creativity in our field of the most advanced age of training of any field of specialized human endeavor with the consequent shortened practice life span that follows; and the inbreeding problem, stemming from the very limited mobility of young psychiatrists establishing professional careers and families while they are at work earning their livelihoods and supporting their concomitant part-time psychoanalytic training, with all the parochialisms and the local factionalisms that this inbreeding fosters, especially in our smaller institutes and societies.
Just tabulated this way, we can readily see how vexing the problems of our very unique kind of educational enterprise are and how difficult of resolution. Aside from the dialectical oppositions of our built-in syncretistic dilemmas, each problem seems so locked into a vast interdependent array of social, institutional, economic, as well as even political constraints that the degrees of freedom for careful trial and proper innovation seem minimal indeed. But, as analysts, we also know better than others that inhibitions can also be psychological and internal, and we seem collectively reluctant to face the fact that the radical doctrine of psychoanalysis, a revolutionary intellectual adventure for mankind, has been transmuted in its educational functionings into an enterprise centrally guided by the most conservative educational ethos.
This is not one-sidedly a fault. There is an essential and, I would say, necessary conservatism in the educational process and educational function which I would counterpose to the essential (in the philosophic sense) radicalism of the research process and function. Where the researcher looks to explore the unknown by questioning both the data and the assumptions that govern the known, the educator is charged to transmit the known in its limitations and in its reach to new generations of students. Obviously, the best pedagogy consists of the dialectical conveying of both stances. But I want to focus on the conserving and, therefore, the conservative aspects of the educational role, because, though this serves us and every educational apparatus well in maintaining the continuity of learning and of tradition, it can also serve in the name of high concern with protection (conservation) of standards, to make indicated innovation and change in educational procedure—with all due safeguards for standards—excessively difficult to come by.
What am I therefore proposing? The impatient view that we cannot just continue to be growingly aware of and to bemoan the seeming numbing conceptual and practical complexity of the many educational problems that beset our educational enterprise, and the wrenching view, that we must collectively, via our institutional structures like COPE and others work now towards resolution of the problems that have surfaced again and again in the Rainbow Report, the Lewin-Ross survey, COPE, and COPER. This is to me the most central business that we face as an organized discipline. To the extent that other kinds of issues, be they professional, political-economic issues or educational, standard-maintaining issues, preempt the stage from what to me are the transcendentally important issues that our field as an educational-scientific enterprise is centrally all about, to that extent we will lose ground in the race to remain in the intellectual forefront of the human collectivity where Freud single-handedly placed us.
Robert S. Wallerstein
San Francisco
This is the first of several Point of View articles on psychoanalytic education. The Editors welcome the viewpoints of our readers on these important issues.