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In 1996, in a panel discussion on psychoanalytic education, I was asked the question: “Should we change our curriculum?” I was delighted with the question because it had become a favourite of mine, having been the first I had asked myself when I became the chairman of the curriculum committee at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in 1991. Back in 1991, I found the question to be an exciting one, alive with possibility and opportunity. Gradually it became a preoccupation, evolved into a rumination, and finally developed the haunting quality of a reproach with suggestions of problems overlooked, rigidities, hidden orthodoxies, or just plain laziness. It was not until I was asked the question again, in the panel discussion of 1996, that I was able to organize my thinking and clear up my symptoms.
Ultimately, I came to understand this change in my experience as reflecting a successful if painful transition from an eager new administrator to a member of the establishment. When I began my psychoanalytic education at the Columbia Center in 1980, I was a member of the last class that studied a curriculum designed by Dr. Arnold M. Cooper (1971-1977). For me, therefore, the contemplation of change always begins from the