Asked to offer a quick impression of contemporary psychoanalytic education and training, as I have experienced these on visits to various institutes here and abroad, I shall focus on a single question: What kind of pedagogy guides the teachers of psychoanalysis? This question, which involves all three components of the traditional tripartite system of education and training, feeds into all of the problems psychoanalysis faces today.
For decades our entire training system has repeatedly been indicted for indoctrinating candidates rather than teaching them to think analytically. To the many complex reasons why analytic educators slip easily and all too frequently into an indoctrinating mode, I want to add one that is rarely the focus of discussion. It is this: We have not yet reliably extracted from our analytic experiences how people learn; we have certainly not formulated a coherent psychoanalytic pedagogy that would inform all three elements of our system. This failure, along with the many unconscious motives and overt political factors that lead us to indoctrinate, creates a fundamental flaw in our teaching. The effects of indoctrination, widely described as stagnation and lack of creativity, are nowhere more clearly evident than in discussions that relate to the various paradigms of psychoanalysis that currently coexist. We do not yet have the wherewithal for a scientifically based comparative psychoanalysis, and our overt or covert dogmatism is frequently evident in these discussions.
Thoughtful psychoanalytic educators have noted that training analyses often indoctrinate candidates rather than freeing up their creativity. This is attested by the fact (along with many other telling symptoms) that analysts follow, often quite slavishly, the theoretical orientation of their training analyst.
If the training analysis locks candidates into a particular theoretical path, how can they ever free themselves from it to create new directions in which to take psychoanalysis? If it is the training analysis through which psychoanalysis is first experientially absorbed and later cognitively assimilated, young analysts' ensuing emotional and intellectual commitment to their own analyst's theory cannot be expected to change readily. What dynamic factors leave an analyst's mind open or closed to new ideas after such an affect-laden experience as a personal analysis is a question that has not yet been adequately investigated.
The key may well be found—at least in part—in how we analyze the candidate's idealizations of the training analyst, as well as of Freud and psychoanalysis. Considering these ubiquitous idealizations as always a defense and never a necessary developmental step, a driving force in becoming a psychoanalyst, appears to contribute to problems faced later on in psychoanalysis, as both profession and science. Here, in dealing with idealizations analytically, a more empirically based approach, rather than an a priori theoretical commitment, might lead to a more generally acceptable solution. Careful clinical observations might show that treating these idealizations invariably as a defense closes to candidates a pathway leading to the salutary internalization of analytic values and ideals.
Without these internalizations, the professional existence of the analyst will be characterized by apathy, depression, lack of creativity, and lack of enthusiasm for analytic work. Through the interpretation of idealizations always as a defense, training analysts inadvertently foster massive, traumatic disillusionment and/or wholesale identification with the aggressor-analyst or, alternatively, provoke total rejection of analysis and the analyst. By contrast, viewing the future analyst's idealizations as a possible expression of remobilized developmental needs, or as a necessary accompaniment of professionalization, will allow the gradual transformation of these idealizations into solid self-esteem and professional values and ideals. Such divergences in approach demand, in Otto Kernberg's words, “empirical inquiry in addition to theoretical discussion.”
It is here that the lack of a coherent psychoanalytic pedagogy is most glaring. Supervisors and seminar leaders rarely “enter” the treatment process presented to them. External observers, they inevitably hear the patient's communications differently and, based on their own understanding, offer interventions they think would have been more suitable. What this pedagogy sorely misses is any discussion of the analysis as actually conducted by the candidate; instead, an analysis conjured up in the supervisor or seminar leader's own mind becomes the topic of discussion. It is not to be wondered at that many candidates, wishing to graduate, come away from this approach indoctrinated by authority.
By contrast, a discussion of the treatment process from the candidate's perspective would allow discovery of how patient and analyst communicated; whether they were on the same wavelength or talked past each other or at cross-purposes; and what the productive or unproductive interventions were—almost irrespective of theoretical framework. This process of discovery would encourage analytic thinking rather than gross imitation and technique-oriented indoctrination. What is most stultifying in supervision is not its limitation to one theoretical approach, but rather the lack of an adequate pedagogy for whatever approach is prevalent in a given institute. Proper training and education in a single approach can contribute substantially to later growth and learning in the clinical situation.
Psychoanalysts are rarely sophisticated pedagogues; equally rarely do they have a coherently articulated grasp of psychoanalytic theory. What they lack in these areas, unfortunately, they often make up with clinical anecdotes and strongly expressed convictions. Often they invoke their many years of experience to emphasize the compelling nature of their views, rather than supporting them with appropriate clinical data and logic. This is much worse in smaller institutes than in larger ones, where there is more psychoanalytic talent, even if no proper pedagogy. In any case, teachers rarely synthesize theory, either for themselves or for their students. Instead they teach it in historical sequence, with the aid of selected key papers, an approach that fosters the trade school atmosphere critics have bemoaned. Too often harried faculty (who, it should be mentioned in their defense, are unpaid part-timers) succumb to the wish to replicate themselves, despite every intention to train good analysts.
The good news is that some of this is beginning to change worldwide, under the impact of the multicultural climate for psychoanalysis that is rapidly emerging. The need to learn about competing trends in contemporary psychoanalysis, and the desirability of dialogue between them, accelerate the movement toward a more functional analytic pedagogy. Without such a pedagogy, psychoanalysis will find itself unable to make the changes necessary to deal with present problems and to face the future confidently.
Paul H. Ornstein, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute.