A reassessment of psychoanalytic education: Controversies and changes

Abstract

To understand the many controversies surrounding psychoanalytic education, it is necessary first to understand the unique role played by education in our field where control of educational structures remains the most important measure of professional success for the majority of psychoanalysts. To keep debate about educational policy focused on the task of strengthening the intellectual basis of psychoanalysis, it is also necessary to understand that forces affecting education arise from at least three different domains which can too easily become confused with one another: 1) the domain of knowledge‐ intellectual, scientific and clinical; 2) the domain of the organized professional community; and 3) the domain of local institutional politics. The authors explore controversy arising within and among each of these domains. They also explore the major alternatives proposed to the Eitingon model of psychoanalytic education, arguing that excessive authoritarianism in education arises not from the existence of hierarchical structures per se (as suggested by the ‘French model’), but from two other factors: the condensation of all important professional functions into the single ‘monolithic’ position of the training analyst, and the lack of agreed upon methodology for determining the validity of theoretical propositions. The solution lies not in obliterating all gaps in expertise and status by doing away with hierarchical structures altogether, but rather in strengthening the intellectual, scholarly and research context within which psychoanalytic education takes place. We must attempt to relocate our experience of a gap where it belongs: not between those who are training analysts and those who are not, but between what we feel we already know about mental life and what we do not yet know.