Since 1938 The American has published Standards for Training in Psychoanalysis, the consensually accepted guidelines and minimum requirements for conducting training at approved institutes. They address all matters connected with the education of candidates, including eligibility, training analysis, curriculum, supervised work, progression, and graduation.
These standards provide a framework for the kind of psychoanalytic experience and education that engenders in our graduates a conviction about psychoanalysis and a central identity as analysts. That identity, I believe, remains a source of professional pride and self-esteem, and is the basis of The American's eminent position in psychoanalytic education and of the weight of respect it commands in the professional world. In contrast to the view that these standards are consensually accepted by the institutes as the best approach to educating candidates stands another view: that the standards are rules imposed on the institutes in an authoritarian and dogmatic manner. On this view, which has gained a certain intensity as The American has tried to cope with the problems facing our profession, BOPS is an external regulator whose imposition of standards impedes necessary change.
Against that view it must be said that BOPS is entrusted with responsibility for the protection, study, and facilitation of psychoanalytic education. It is the forum where difficulties in the application of standards are discussed and where approaches taking new experience into account are explored, refined, and adopted. It represents the pluralism and wide experience in education among our institutes. The Fellows of the Board are the current leaders, often elected, of institute faculties.
It should not be surprising, then, that pressures and ideas for change present a great deal of difficulty. At times proposed changes would significantly alter the standards currently thought of as defining psychoanalytic education and the identity of our organization. In these situations the challenge to BOPS is to find a balance allowing both the maintenance of principles and minimum standards, and the arrival at creative and effective solutions to the problems plaguing colleagues and institutes at a time when the very survival of our profession is at stake. Just this wise balance has been achieved in the past, as BOPS has confronted and attempted to understand the many pressures upon us. Certainly, now as then, the remedies do not lie in any wholesale liquidation of our organizational identity, or of the source of our prestige in psychoanalytic education. Any changes to be made should come only after careful consideration, rather than hastily, in the heat generated by outside pressures. Precipitous actions would only strip our candidates and graduates of their professional pride and values, and their positions of leadership as teachers and practitioners within the mental health community.
These perspectives guide the current revision of our standards for training, which, by the way, have been revised several times previously—in 1950, 1956, 1971, 1977, and 1984. One major area to be addressed in the revision involves the significant changes made in direct eligibility for clinical training and the possibility for waivered admission of applicants from a variety of clinical backgrounds.
Past revisions have recognized that psychoanalytic education must evolve as an increasing depth of understanding is gained into the issues involved in teaching and learning our complex profession. In the past decade psychoanalysis has become more open, theoretically better balanced, and mature. There is more emphasis now on “principles” and less on “standards.” Institutes are less stratified, and we generally convey a more inquiring attitude, with a greater emphasis on learning than on the authoritarian passing-down of knowledge. The emphasis today is more on education—on encouraging candidates' curiosity, reflection, and critical judgment—than on training. All of this has enriched our science and our educational processes.
The current revision will seek to enunciate the principles underlying our standards, where previously we may have been silent. The emphasis is on understanding rather than on rote learning and uncritical acceptance. For example, in regard to the optimal frequency of a training analysis, the current standards state that the analysis “shall be conducted five times a week, four as a minimum.” The revision will note the role this frequency plays in providing the continuity, the access to unconscious derivatives, the facilitation of regression, and the development of analyzable transferences that allow the optimal analytic experience necessary to the integration, within the analysis, of personal issues and of issues arising from exposure to analytic supervision and the curriculum. The need for this integration provides much of the rationale for the tripartite model of analytic education. Another significant reason for employing that model is its provision of an appropriate continuous immersion, designed to foster an overall understanding of the complex clinical field of psychoanalysis, in a wide variety of clinical and classroom experiences. From this follows, for instance, the “requirement” of a minimum of three cases with three different supervisors, and the “requirement” of clinical case seminars.
The revision will also attempt to incorporate a more integrated understanding of the role of child analysis in the optimal education of candidates. To a considerable extent, exposure to child analysis will be considered a requisite part of analytic education.
The revision will also recognize that many variations, both individual and institute-wide, around the standards may be necessary. The standards, after all, are not meant to be applied mindlessly, without reflection or consideration of the individual. Rather, they are guidelines meant to ensure that we continue to offer to future psychoanalysts what we consider the very best preparation for their careers.
The preparation of this revision of the published standards for training has been undertaken by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Revision of Standards. Chaired by Cornelis “Bud” Heijn, former chair of the Board's Membership Committee, it includes Stephen Morgenstern, current chair of the Committee on Institutes, and Richard Fox, current chair of the Membership Committee. The process will include input from all relevant committees of the Board and from the education committees of the institutes. As the process advances, reports will be presented to the Fellows for discussion. Through input from the Coordinating Committee and from a number of committees of the Board, including in particular the Committee on Institutes, most institutes have already had a hand in the initial drafts. As work progresses, further drafts will be sent to institute education committees for comment and help in the fine tuning of the document.