Acceptance into training at a psychoanalytic institute in France is based on the principle that the personal analysis of the candidate-to-be is well under way or has terminated.
Specifically, it is considered necessary that prior to beginning his supervised analyses, the candidate's Oedipal issues have been sufficiently analyzed, so that the psychic structuring implicit in an adequate resolution of the Oedipal complex will facilitate the future candidate's capacity to analyze neurotic patients.
The underlying principle of French training contrasts with the Anglo-American notion that psychoanalytic training is an apprenticeship undertaken during the training itself. In France one's personal analysis is the framework and the structure through which one learns what analysis is. Subsequently, those who so desire, and who are evaluated as having the capacity to utilize a super-vision (a bit like using glasses to help focus), may apply to train at the society. There they have access to supervision in tandem with the opportunity to develop a solid theoretical grounding, first and foremost, in Freudian theory. A minimum of two supervised analyses is required, one of which must be in a group.
The French point of view is that the aptitude to practice analysis can only be evaluated after the candidate himself has been analyzed. The primary and overriding function of supervision is to facilitate the passage from the couch to the armchair. The reversal of position from couch to armchair requires the visceral knowledge obtained during analysis, subsequently confirmed by learning through books and supervision.
In collective supervision, each candidate presents analytic process simultaneously to a training analyst and to other candidates. Candidates both similar to and different from the presenting candidate may hear what the presenter does not hear in the material. A different experience of the unconscious is generated: a cross-unconscious experience (in the graceful expression of André Green), not unlike the notion of a cross-cultural experience.
In collective supervision, the candidate engages in polyvalent listening to other psyches, those of his colleagues in the group as well as those of patients presented. Listening to a variety of cases, in a sustained and ongoing manner over the course of years, facilitates the development of an internal mobility — the mental gymnastics necessary for being able to listen to the multiple levels of discourse every patient presents (fantasies both conscious and unconscious, instinctual movement, drives, defenses, language). In collective supervision, assuming the personal analyses of the candidates in the group are sufficiently advanced, the listening candidates take a new role, that of (peer) supervisor.
“The French point of view is that the aptitude to practice analysis can only he evaluated after the candidate himself has been analyzed. The primary and overriding function of supervision is to facilitate the passage from the couch to the armchair. The reversal of position from couch to armchair requires the visceral knowledge obtained during analysis, subsequently confirmed by learning through books and supervision.”
For the participants in a group supervision there is a double identification: with both supervisor and supervisee. There is also a double process: listening to the patient as the material is presented and listening to the process of the analyst who is presenting.
This facilitates the development of triangulating processes, or “thirdness.” In this psychoanalytic state of mind, listening to the patients material brings the candidate closer to the capacity to supervise himself, the ultimate goal of all supervision. Thirdness, or tertiary processes (as Green has termed it) is a notion fundamental to the French understanding of Freud. It recognizes the ineluctable necessity of a third party whose mediation prevents the subject-object confrontation from becoming a closed circuit.
In the analytic situation, the two protagonists, analyst and analysand, are both together and apart. The analyst listens to the language and the affect through which the patient expresses his desire both to be in contact and to avoid contact with the analyst. Then the analyst interprets, using both his conscious understanding and what his own unconscious permits him to understand (hence the importance of a personal analysis well under way or completed).
Interpreting implies the paradoxical goals of maintaining contact while preserving the distance necessary for insight to flourish (as Maurice Bouvet discussed in his 1957 paper on “Distance and Variations”). It integrates the secondary processes of language (word presentations in Freudian theory) with primary process logic (thing presentations: affects, acts, and somatic states). Thus the analyst must take into consideration primary processes without withdrawing claims to secondary processes.
This implies an ego capable of moving back and forth between material reality and psychic reality and capable of forming temporary hypotheses that can transform as the analytic process develops. The tertiary processes, thirdness, are these instruments of liaison. They make possible a creative use of coexisting primary and secondary processes, as opposed to a more classical idea that secondary processes must dominate the primary. One might say thirdness is the phenomenon of being able to associate between primary and secondary processes and thus that it safeguards against excessive splitting and psychic death.
Ellen A. Sparer, Ph.D., is a member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, where she did her psychoanalytic training. She is licensed as a clinical psychologist in the state of California, where she studied for her Ph.D. in psychology. She relocated from California to Paris in 1982. She thanks André Green and Thierry Bokanowski for their generous help in discussing this theme with her.
The French notion of thirdness can be illustrated by the following: The structural value of the Oedipal complex is the way in which one comes to terms with the libidinal as well as relational tragedy — and hope — intrinsic to every subject: that he or she has two objects. The Winnicottian notion that no baby can exist without its mother has been extended by Green, who emphasizes the obvious fact that the mother-baby duo can only come into existence with the presence of a father.
Once a candidate is admitted to the institute, in most cases, it is his or her decision as to whether to begin with individual or collective supervision. Each new candidate spends three months observing a group, which he may join, if he wishes and a place is available. Generally, there is a delay of one year before beginning a second supervision.
Most group supervisors limit the number of candidates who present in a group to a maximum of four persons. In most cases, the candidates choose the group supervisor. Some supervisors limit the time each candidate may have to present his material. The two groups in which I participated, however, began at 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. and often went on until midnight.
The abundance of material presented in the group is its richness and simultaneously its weakness. The overabundance at times makes it difficult to work through with a given candidate libidinal movements that may be making it difficult for the candidate to listen and interpret. In some circumstances, other group members may be able to articulate that which the supervisor prefers not to say. Conversely, there may be a concentration of aggression toward a particular candidate, reflecting the desire to show the supervisor that the other candidates know more.
As in any supervision, collective supervision aims to carefully expose analysts-in-training to different analytic situations specifically by exposing them to other methods of working. These cross-unconscious experiences help preserve future analysts from the risk of psychic accidents while listening to conscious and unconscious movements in patients they wish to put on the couch. Many analysts find that close friendships develop from their experience in collective supervision. Others find it does not compare to the depth of the individual experience. In France there is an ongoing and lively debate about collective supervision and its utility and pertinence as a primary or subordinate teaching tool. In any case, it is universally recognized as uniquely French.