Candidates Create Dialogue Across Institutes

Since September 2007, a group of candidates from several different institutes in New York City has been meeting monthly, with the goal of stimulating inter-institute discussion. Our first event (held this past September 26) was a panel discussion on progression practices in psychoanalytic training.

The idea for our collective originated with the editors of The Candidate journal at the New York University (NYU) Psychoanalytic Institute. They put out a call to candidates from other institutes, and after a few initial meetings, a core group began meeting regularly. A strong sense of collegiality, and a sense of discovery, developed over the course of these discussions. Currently there are 7 institutes represented by 11 candidates: NYU Psychoanalytic Institute (Hilary Rubenstein Hatch, Carlos Almeida, and Abby Herzig), New York Psychoanalytic Institute (Gregory Lowder and Hilli Dagony-Clark), Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (David Gutman), NYU Postdoctoral Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Margery Kalb), William Alanson White Institute (Victoria Malkin), New York Freudian Society (C.J. Churchill), and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (Richard Grose and Kim Gelé).

Here in New York City, those seeking analytic training have the luxury of choosing among numerous institutes with a range of child and adult analytic programs. Despite this rich opportunity, most candidates gain very little knowledge of other institutes and their members. During training and after, an institute plays a large role in one's professional and, often, personal life. This provides a home base and a community, but it can also limit one's perspective to the confines of a single institute. What's more, the histor y of psychoanalytic institutes has been marked by such insularity, which was often fueled by heated theoretical battles, schisms, and policies for exclusion.

Our group came together to break down this insularity and bring candidates from various programs together in an atmosphere similar to a university setting. The institutes represented in our collective are of varied history and background. Some of our institutes cover a broad scope of analytic theories in their training, while others focus on one or another “school” of psychoanalysis. Some of our institutes were founded in order to offer training for candidates who were excluded—because of professional discipline or other reasons—from other institutes represented in our collective. Our goal is to move beyond such historical issues, and theoretical and pedagogical differences, to build a candidate community for support and discussion of issues that are pertinent to psychoanalytic training in the 21st century.

Our initial topic of interest has been training, but, more broadly, we want to create a forum for ideas that are rarely brought out for discussion—those aspects of analytic work and training that may be unconscious or pre-conscious; hence the title of our first event, “Orthodoxy is Unconsciousness.” We asked the panelists—all senior analysts from our institutes—to imagine themselves as the founding members of a new institute meeting to establish practices to facilitate and evaluate progress throughout the training process. We wanted to explore how gatekeeping practices influence who trains, who becomes an analyst, and what happens after graduation. We chose two candidates from our group to serve as moderators.

Another project we have undertaken is to collect data about training policies from each of our institutes. This includes cross-institute comparisons on a broad range of issues: tuition, supervision, personal analysis fees, who is eligible for admission, number of control cases, and what criteria are used, and by whom, to determine when a candidate is ready for graduation. We have found some thought-provoking differences. For instance, some of us were surprised to find that the concept of “readiness for control,” which is a major hurdle at some institutes, is virtually nonexistent at others. As another example, at some institutes there are very specific, quantitative criteria specifying the length of time training cases should continue, whereas at other institutes this is assessed on a subjective basis by “demonstration of an analytic process.”

Perhaps most interesting to us were the significant differences in tuition and supervision fees. We found that the most expensive institute of our collective cost nearly four times as much as the least expensive (in terms of supervision and tuition). This stimulated thoughts about how much time supervisors can afford to donate to training, the extent to which institutes help candidates build up a well-paying private practice, and, not least, financial disparities among candidates of different professional backgrounds. We plan to continue gathering this comparative data and intend to make it available to others.

We invite other candidates to join us as we begin planning future projects. Various ideas include arranging for candidates to take classes at other institutes, holding a series of inter-institute clinical presentations, and reaching out to candidates from institutes outside of New York City. Participation in this group has allowed for a rich intellectual experience, along with the opportunity to be part of a wonderful group of fellow candidates—we strongly encourage others to join.