Once More

Psychoanalysis and the Academy:

One

This Post is a response to a recent discussion on the issue of psychoanalysis and the academy in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (Volume 64. #3, June 2016). It should have been properly written as a paper on the raised issues in the volume, but I did not find the energy and the endurance to engage in a well vetted paper. However, I will try my best to avoid the temptations to be slack in raising issues and expounding them. I will make sure that scrutinizing this paper will prove that it came from documented literature and be put to shame.

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1.The theory of content and the theory of process:

I approached this subject before in regards to the dropping interest in psychoanalysis and moving analysis to academia could save it from ominous demise. I centered my arguments then on two issues: the insistence of the analytic organization on considering psychoanalysis a profession, when it has only the features of a ‘guild’ or a trade, and is officially and legally an appendage to three main professions: psychology, psychiatry and social work. Thus, it is unable still to gain the respectable status of a certifiable profession (by a third party), The second issue is insisting on preserving the traditional system of qualifying psychoanalysts through apprenticeship instead of education, and putting the emphasis on “professional standards” of the trainers and the trainees instead of on the qualifying methods of educating and training the applicants for certification. In more relevant words to the contemporary psychoanalysts’ minds: not to look for standards of professional competence in the trainers and the trainees but in the system of training itself. It is paradoxical-to say the least- to expect the society to accept and certify graduates of our training centers when those centers have no indication or the proof that their taring qualifies its graduates. It is like the church which qualifies its clergy, abut not like faculty of law preparing its graduate to sit for ‘bar’, the real test of competency. 

In this post-which is going to be long and divided into sections- I want to be less tentative in saying what I know would raise the backs of the training analysts, most of the analyst who have certified themselves, and the candidate who would not accept certification from anyone else but their mentors, who “somehow” convinced them that psychoanalysis is not for the public but for the fortunate few who are accepted in the institutes. I am saying that because the issue is not whether psychoanalysis is something unique-which I will support later on but differently, but because the emphasis those mentor, whom I was one before I retired, put on eth acceptance to training and not what training is.

The history of training shows two characteristics: Training came as an afterthought. It started as a means to put some order in the burgeoning interest in joining the pioneering psychoanalysts of the twenties and thirties of the last century. Abraham and Eitingon started the enterprise to discovered that it is a very involved one. At the beginning the issue was to give the candidates some didactic training by undergoing a period of psychoanalysis. Shortly after, it became clear that psychoanalysis is developing into a trade (not a profession yet) and needs to adopt a more extensive system of transmitting knowledge and experience from one generation to the next. This almost surprising awareness pushed the international Training Committee to recommend increasing the period of training and created a tripartite model of training. Gradually but rather quickly the system of the Training Institutes became a fact of life in the life of the newer generations of analysts.    

In natural way the selection of the trainees and the criteria of ‘the good’ analyst became an issue, and the psychological health of the analyst was considered a main part of training. This issue evolved quietly to give didactic analysis the new function of therapy, and in no obvious way it became the central point in training. The main point of therapeutic analysis as the main part in the tripartite system changed the whole idea of training. In the first-place candidates were selected by analysts (training analysts) who will take the responsibility of choosing the right future analysts. Secondly, the training analysts had to be chosen too, thus another game of nepotism and favoritism had to develop. The closed circle of the psychoanalytic guild created an inner circle of master guilder psychoanalysts. Psychoanalysis changed into a ‘culture’ of those who know and those who know, but less. A. Freud addressed that issue as early as 1939 and expressed concerns about its effect on training, as Eitingon kept reminding of its silent yet negative quality in almost every annual report on training since the beginning (1928). Balint, Benedek, Bernfeld, Heiman, Langer,Van der Leeuw also made some profound observations on the same issue of taring changing into some sort of a system of creating a cult instead of just creating a guild. This innocent development caught the attention of some senior analysts like Limentani and Calif. Limentani even said: “Institutional training is probably antithetical to psychoanalysis” (1974).

Before we get any further it is important to underline somethings in the critical literature of the old literature (before the sixties).  The training system of the psychoanalysis was a necessity and still is, but it was never-ever- satisfactory since its birth in 1924-25. Training was needed because psychoanalysis by then has thrived and the number of analysts and their dispersion in many places made the IPA demand having a handle on the membership. If we add to that the development of the theory by the increased membership and their contributions to the literature, the notion of standardizing training was a natural product of those changes. In addition, there was already a body of knowledge that required streamlining to be part of the theoretical foundation of the new generation of psychoanalysts. Yet, in the late twenties and the thirties psychoanalysis was still unaccepted by the physicians to attach it to psychiatry, and its acceptance by psychology was not enough to change it from a guild to a profession. What is unnoticed or not dealt with in that literature is the awareness of the founders (S. Freud, Eitingon, Bendik, A Freud, Sachs and others) of significant flaws and defects in the “system” of training but their helplessness in dealing them, and declaring their dissatisfaction by just mentioning them. What they were unsatisfied with is what the next generations became aware of and even contributed to entrench the flaws in the system and amplify them., despite the continued awareness of their detrimental result   aware of the difficulties and the mistakes, which the next generation of dissatisfied analyst were able to define and verbalize: the conduction of training in an unhealthy environment according to psychoanalytic standards and conception. The best articulation of the dismay about training is expressed by Safouan (2000): “The institutionalization of psychoanalysis was like a ‘repetition’ or ‘rehearsal’ which enacted without the ‘actant’s being aware, the myth pronounced by Freud in Totem and Taboo, of a ‘fraternal’ deal dictated by a murder…” . The criticism of training was conscious and for conscious reason, therefore there is no escape from asking what was the unconscious inhibition to correct it?  The conscious answer is: what else? In the issue of JAPA I mentioned above Kernberg and Mitchels suggest modifications and improvements in the training system that would be best done within an academic milieu.

I will come to those suggestions later but for now we have to seriously consider this next point:

Soon after the end of WWII, the settlement of the migrating analysts in their new countries there was a boom in the field of the theory and also practice; consequently, in training. We should pay attention to the change in the theory because it was the origin of the plurality of schools of psychoanalysis that has impacted training in major ways. The first and most serious development in that area was in England, resulting in accepting- for the first serious way- the possibility of having two systems of training based on differences in the theoretical backgrounds. The “Controversies” of 1947 were relegated to personal conflicts between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. They were more significant that such limited understanding. Take for instance the term Identification and consider its meaning in Freudian and Kleinian psychology. Anna Freud coined the concept of identification with the aggressor. For her identification was an outcome of a defensive process, a psychical condition resulting from fear, an element of the intrapsychical structure of the ego. Klein’s projective identification is initiation of a constructive intrapsychical process that establishes a particular relationship with the other. In one theory Identification is the outcome of psychical processes, and in other it is the process the process itself. Although the British Society established a two training branches as a political solution to the conflict it was in fact a very fundamental decision: training follows the theory and not the other way around. I am almost certain that this issue was not seriously considered in any discussion about training at any stage. The reason is as peculiar as the peculiarity of missing it.

Any theory, nomothetic or idiographic, leads to a point where it has to be revised (I discussed this matter in a book that will be published in January). Therefore, psychoanalysis must have been a theory due to a revision (I will not do that in this post). However, we should consider the various splits that happened as early as 1910 of Adler and Jung, the acrimonies of Ferenczi and Rank were poor and premature revisions of the theory. But in the fifties in England, France, and the US the splits were for clearer attempts at revising the theory albeit still under the umbrella of the IPA.  

Before Freud the human subject was ‘the human being’ who ununderstandably generates his personal life and participates in creating social life. Nothing was understandable of how those things happen. I would say with confidence that Freud’s remarkable contribution to humanity started with discovering the intrapsychical. He discovered that what makes the human being what he is, is unconscious psychological processes, i.e. the presence of intrapsychical life, which what turns the human being into a human subject and not just a superior primate. This is another way of saying that the discovery of what is human in the human being is an unconscious psychological life, which by being unconscious could be called metaphorically inner. At the beginning Freud thought that human sexuality is the cause and source of what was named then ‘hysteria’. As we all know, Freud did not seize discovering, reconfiguring, and rearticulating his findings. One thing was clear: he was eager   and hopeful to find a formulation of the intrapsychical life to be like the final statement of his efforts. When he came to the formula of ego -psychology he thought for a while that is it; it was a neat way of visualizing the intrapsychical. Luckily it was Freud and not some other person and he still had few years to live to find out that ego psychology is reifying psychical life and emptying of life. He went back to his most intuitive concept of the psychical system (the topographic model) and reintroduced it to the deceptive ego-psychology.

Freud was concentrating on discovering more elements, components, divisions, constituents of the intrapsychical life of the subject. He believed, and many analysts still believe that the psychoanalytic theory is theory of contents: trauma, deprivation, defenses, abnormalities, issues, etc. Yet what he did but missed is discovering how the intrapsychic creates the psychological nature of the subject and establishes the kind of interpersonal relations with others. In other words: after uncovering the intrapsychical he was intuitive enough to discover the unconscious intrapsychical in the interpersonal quasi conscious life of the human subject. The splendid trip through the intrapsychical led him to understand the natural byproduct of interpersonal. Freud had two theories of psycho analysis (see my book on Freud’s Theory of Psychoanalysis): one about content and one about process. The split between the Freudians and the Kleinian in the late forties, the Paris society and the French Association in the fifties, and within Ego Psychology and between Ego Psychology and Self Psychology was replicating the same thing: Is psychoanalysis a theory of psychical contents or of the psychical process irrespective of the content?

I venture and spell out my deep belief that the issue of training in psychoanalysis and moving it to academia is related to that split in our theory. If psychoanalysis is a theory of psychical content then the Institute System is the place to train under the traditional tripartite protocol, and moving it to academia, as Kernberg and Michels are suggesting, would not be beneficial and would not be acceptable in Academia. If we realize that the outdated theory (theories) of content has to be gradually phase out we could then relinquish the Guild system of training and go for the academic system of education.

Before I leave this section of my post I should underline that my point of view is based on a a different understanding of the Freudian revolution. Thus, it is expected that my views would not be agreeable to those who limit his enterprise as on limited the creation of a psychotherapy theory that might have some peripheral applications.