Regarding Jacqueline Hellers article, “L.A. Area Candidates Voice Concerns” (TAP 27/2), you wrote, “her presentation of the attitudes of candidates toward their training should be carefully considered by everyone involved in any way with analytic education.” I am in full agreement.

Heller states that candidates would like conferences in which senior analysts present their own cases and quotes Arlow and Brenner as also advocating that. At the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP) we had already recognized such needs and have had exactly such case conferences from the very start of ICP two years ago. A group of our most senior training analysts (Herbert Linden, Richard Rosenstein, Doryann Lebe, Arnold Wilson, and myself) have presented their work to first-year students in their first clinical case conference. These have been enormously successful, reducing the idealization and fantasies of perfection surrounding training analysts, and freeing candidates from a sense of paralyzing discrepancy between our assumed perfection and their own imperfections.

ICP was founded in January 1991 as an experimental psychoanalytic institute, to see if we could reanimate and bring back the excitement of psychoanalytic training. Of the twelve founding members of ICP, ten of us continue as training analysts in the Southern California or Los Angeles Institutes. What is interesting in our experimenting with new ideas is how much we have dealt with the problems articulated in Otto Kernberg's plenary lecture at the 1984 Annual Meeting of The American. Apparently ICP, as an experimental psychoanalytic institute, is validating Kernberg's hypotheses. The openness and other experimental qualities of ICP that Heller describes are most appealing to potential psychoanalytic candidates—we have 37 applicants for the class starting in September, including quite a few psychiatric residents.

John A. Lindon, M.D.

Los Angeles