2. Does Trainting Help Psychoanalysis or Hurt it?

      My question could sound frivolous because it cannot be answered before asking another preliminary question: what else is psychoanalysis if not what we are trained to practice? Training- up till now- is the only formal and settled way of acquiring knowledge and expertise in psychoanalysis. It is also the only way to formerly join the psychoanalytic community. The implicit characterisation of psychoanalysis as practice creates a paradox: psychoanalysis is the practice of psychoanalysis.

      In the first part I stressed that the psychoanalytic movement has benefited from the notion of training and the institute system. It allowed giving the new discipline the needed outline to grow and build an identity and to identify its membership. However, when the movement reached full extension and expansion and popularity in the late sixties and the early seventies it started to show signs of fatigue. Those signs showed themselves in a telling way: a trend toward divisions. The one analysis generated several schools, and the schools, with their explicit titles, claimed to be new modalities of psychoanalysis. Yet, they were merely expanding the boundaries of the theory (haphazardly most of the time), indirectly criticizing the limitations of the Freudian Theory and trying to replace it. The result was deterioration in the status of significance and distinction which psychoanalysis enjoyed since its inception. There was also noticeable decline in the interest of young professional in joining the movement. The schools of psychoanalysis created confusion instead of delivering clear ideas of what they suggested to replace the classical theory with. Notwithstanding, all the factions that came out of the main psychoanalytic body maintained the same method of qualifying its members: training in the accredited training institutes. In other terms: whatever the position the new schools took from psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis remained an issue of training. Psychoanalysts, whatever their theoretical bend could not see in psychoanalysis anything beyond its practice. 

      In the last part I tried to show that if it was not for Klein and Kleinian’s psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis would have stifled to death under the weight of ego psychology.  To make that statement relevant to a discussion I would say that ego psychology had a settled and established theoretical formulation of the intrapsychical components and their dynamic interactions, i.e., it had “things to know and to do”. For example, psychoanalysis (the practice) was to strengthen the ego to cope with the demand of the id and the super ego. Theory and practice were substitutes for each other. Klein and the Kleinians thought about those givens, questioned their nature, origins, their implications in understanding the psychical phenomena and what they stand for. For instance, identification was not any more a psychical happening that results from assimilating and owning a characteristic or an attribute of the object, i.e. not a mechanism.  Kleinian psychoanalysis viewed identification as part of the process of the formation of the subject. By doing that the psychoanalytic theory moved from giving things to know to explaining what to be known first. The most significant product of Kleinian psychoanalysis was a new conception of development: what happens to the intrapsychical configuration when the infant starts to have objects and relates to others? Development was not a happening to the psychosexual constituents of the subject, but a transformation in the dealing with the world: external and internal. They were in search of the meaning of what we encounter in clinical practice, and came up with concepts that sometimes were useful (the true and false self) and sometimes not so useful (the paranoid- schizoid position and the depressive position).  The difference between the two schools was that one had firm knowledge that does not need more thinking, and the other was inviting the process of thinking about what is known, because naming them did not explain much. Repeating my self: still although the Kleinians introduced several totally new conceptions to psychoanalysis about what we encounter in its practice and opened the eyes to the need to learn more about those concepts, the Eitingon model of training remained the core of psychoanalytic knowledge. Psychoanalysts refused (not resisted) to see psychoanalysis outside its practice mode despite the vast interest of the none clinicians and the intellectuals in psychoanalysis, since the end of the second world war.

      It was not only the Kleinians who kept the hart of psychoanalysis beating. In France, the end of the first split allowed some of the most dedicated and academicians analyst establish a new society that introduced the scholarly study of the Freudian text; an approach that left ego psychology behind and advance a new and brilliant approach to psychoanalysis. Even Lacan, who was for a while one of that new trend still delivered a dozen Seminars in his “return to Freud” which were exceptionally revealing of Freud’s genius. After that he began his own trip in psychoanalysis. Although I do not know what happened in South America except some responding to both Klein and Lacan, I cannot dismiss the possibility of some great psychoanalysis there judging by Matte-Blanco’s work on the unconscious. Although in both France and South America some significant improvement were introduced to the systems of training was still the only open door to learn psychoanalysis.  

      The Kleinian approach to psychoanalysis showed that there is more to ‘learn’ about the human subject than what training system was offering in the late forties and early fifties. The strong emergence of Keinianism proved that psychoanalysts should take serious steps to explore new domains of the intrapsychical field. Training was lagging behind the novel conceptions that exceeded the stale theory of ego psychology. Kleinianism and the new additions that came from the French and the South American schools of psychoanalysis opened psychoanalysis to the humanities (which existed but was still limited). The new discoveries in infancy could have started child psychology in the fifties on a brilliant course of research and findings. Bion’s theories of thinking and group dynamics could have given projective techniques (Rorschach, TAT, drawing, etc.)  major push to explore the Alfa and Beta elements and functions in psychometry and provide social and industrial psychology with a new vision of small and large group dynamics. Even Ego Psychology, which was almost dying, had things to offer to psychotherapy by the innovations suggested by Rappaport and Gill. There were things to learn and to do in psychoanalysis beside training. Better, the limited understating of psychoanalysis kept the analysts captives of the concept of training and the institutes as the only places for that training to take place. Conflating and fusing (confusing) learning and training in psychoanalysis hurt psychoanalysis badly, not only because it made us, psychoanalysts, miss the chance to link with the humanities, but made other psychoanalyses have the same fate of ego psychology. We turned the psychical processes into operational definitions; for example instead of talking about the ego as ‘ a thing’ we talked about the introjection of ‘part objects’ as a thing that actually happen. Worse, Kleinian psychoanalysis seemed to have something to say about the oral phase and much less to what happened after the infant dealt with the transitory objects, although the way of thinking about the old psychosexual model of developing could have benefited from the Kleinian additions to the oral phase, and extended it to the other psychosexual phases.

      Turning thought into concrete entities, or turning psychical processes into psychical concepts is almost a hidden unconscious agreement not to question each other about what we mean by what we say [ you know what I mean; we are both Kleinians or Lacanians]. This attitude is seldom if ever found in academia, but it is a the pervasive attituded in the training institutes in psychoanalysis: we are not supposed to expect more from training than training. What complicates matters more is that candidates are usually trained by senior analysts who have known affiliations to a school or another. Confusing training with learning made idealizing the training analysts take a disguise in idealising the school the TA follows. It less infantile or neurotic. The problem with the negative role the TA plays in training is not related to the position of the TA, and would disappear by eliminating that post. The problem is limiting psychoanalysis to the idea of training, which in itself puts all the emphasis on training and putting learning outside the equation of the formation of the candidate. The institutes of psychoanalysis are not supposed to be places to learn psychoanalysis but places to trained to practice it. If the reason is not that the TA is a clinician and not a teacher, then it is because the time and the organization of the curriculum in the institutes do not permit enough time to get into the basic propositions of the intrapsychical configuration.  Thus, the learning part in the formation of the new generation is reduced to knowing some fixed conceptions of a very dynamic filed of activity.  What is taught in the institutes is ready made concepts, description of processes that have clinical importence but are meaningless without a good theoretical verification and explanation.

      The answer to my question of does training hurt psychoanalysis is yes. Training blocks learning and gives the impression that what is to be learned regarding psychoanalysis is the technique of practicing it as psychotherapy. It is common in the institutes discourage the candidates who inquire about something implicit in a technical issue. This notion is an inherited parochial belief that psychoanalysis is psychotherapy and every thing else is merely application of its theory. Firstly, we do not have a theory of psychoanalysis yet. Secondly, psychoanalysis is part of and belongs to the humanities; it has a clinical application in the field of psychopathology. Thirdly, psychoanalysis could be taken both as a transitive verb and as a noun: as a verb it is an act that requires training, but as a noun it is a body of knowledge that demands learning. It started as an act but by now it is an important body of knowledge, clearly a component of the human sciences (idiographic sciences), and it is a big mistake to think that that its body of knowledge that could be obtained from other fields of the humanities is of no major importance to the clinicians.

      It is not a secret that psychoanalysts are the ones who reject (not just resist) changing the status quo in psychoanalysis. They are always ready to look into the flaws of the structure of their organizations and try to make modifications here and there. But, they are not ready to see that it is not simply a practice that could be learned by training. There are two obvious points: training in analysis is not learning psychoanalysis, and the institute system of training is not only outdated, it is counterproductive. Why then analysts do not want admit to those two obvious points and work on changing the institute model that was once our reason of existence and now is the threat of our demise.