The 1993 Symposium on Psychoanalytic Education Revisited

Abstract

When Judy Kaplan, on behalf of the Psychoanalytic Review, asked me to revisit and report my current views on the Symposium on Psychoanalytic Education that Jack Arlow and I conducted fifteen years ago, my first reaction was sadness that Jack is no longer here to conduct the same symposium once more with its five discussants. What an interesting symposium this would have made. My second feeling was an astonishment at how very much my thinking has changed during that interval. A brief recapitulation is required. Arlow directed his discussion primarily toward achieving a reworking of our attitude toward Freud’s work, primarily the case histories. He argued that they should be assigned to the history of psychoanalysis and not taught as a model of how the analyst should aim to work. Arlow coined the term “apostolic” for that period where the leading analysts had all known Freud as a mentor. He asked us to enter with him into the postapostolic age. In my presentation I addressed myself primarily to the question of how the current diversity of psychoanalytic schools should be taught without sharpening the emphasis on the diver-