Psychoanalysis: training or learning?

3. Revision of Dysfunctional System of Training

The training system of Eitingon and its institutes were “unintentionally” a bubble that protected the early psychoanalytic movement from several dangers. The analytic community grew in a homogeneous way, and got early confidence in its distinction from being an organization that is self-ruling. Anyone who wanted to join had to go through the same procedure. The theory was improving and expanding, and it was transmitted to the new comers and the seekers of membership in an organized manner, which tightened the cohesiveness of the analytic community irrespective of its geographic location. Psychoanalysts were saved from having to deal with the critical and negative views of psychoanalysis, which were strong and widespread at the time. Analysts did not have effective means to deal with them within a budding movement few members in number, an unsettled theory and equally unsettling to its members. There was little external social support from the medical profession, which considered psychoanalysis an imposition on it. The new movement was dependent mostly on the status of Freud. 
That bubble was quite useful at the beginning of the movement, but it had its disadvantages. It gave the psychoanalysis a sense of distinction and superiority that was not founded on anything concrete except their isolation. The isolation was reciprocal, as they isolated ourselves from others, others were also avoiding communicating with them. The protective bubble eventually proved to have negative outcomes. Analysts neglected their responsibility to prove themselves and the public was divided unequally in their views about psychoanalysis; a minority was blindly supportive of the progressive ideas implicit in psychoanalysis and a majority were demanding proofs to what psychoanalysts were claiming. Both sides accepted the bubble created by the particular requirement of training specified by the psychoanalytic organization. 
Freud's death revealed a very paradoxical feature in psychoanalysis. During his life psychoanalysts did not make a distinction between theory and practice, or better between learning and training. Freud's view represented both those two aspects of psychoanalysis. Logically, what should have kept the movement united and intact was a stable theory, that it could engender a training system.  What happened was the opposite: Freud did not leave us a theory to unite us, and the system of training, which has become more or less international, functioned as the force behind the continuation of the analytic movement. However,  there were signs of cracks in the organization everywhere due to the evolution of the theoretical issues in psychoanalysis in spite of a silent belief that psychoanalysts was a unified theory. Once again the system of training was the real force that kept the analytic movement seemingly intact. How could psychoanalysis continue on without a unified theory and survive on system of training? Those cracks were not seen then as problems in the theory but were mostly treated as personal conflicts (neurotic idiosyncrasies).
In the late fifties and the sixties of last century a strange thing happened in a natural way; an explosion of publications, formal and informal meetings and media discussion about the unconscious and indirectly psychoanalysis. Almost, a spontaneous ‘international symposium’ was formed from intellectuals in the fields of philosophy (existentialism and phenomenology), literature, theater (the absurd literature of Beckett, Ionesco, Camus!), literary critiquing of old works (Kafka, Flaubert, Dostoevsky), visual arts, and most of all the promising structural theory in the humanities. It was a decade of very rich revival of mutual interest in the human subject, very much in the style of Freud’s dream for psychoanalysis. It was basically a symposium on the unconscious and its presence in all aspects of human phenomena. Some analysts participated ( Rollo May)in that symposium but did not contribute anything of significance, because they were leery of having non-analyst (non-clinician) in their bubble. They were also unable to talk meaningfully about the unconscious that those “amateurs’ were making an issue of.  Psychoanalysts ignored Freud’s third meaning of Ucs. as a system  and the non-repressed unconscious, as they still do. They also did not pay attention that the unconscious has become culturally acceptable and ordinary people started to integrate psychoanalysis in their daily life. In other words, analysts and the analytic organization did not take score of the changes psychoanalysis has introduced to the world outside the bubble of training. The protective bubble changed to become a salient cell of isolation. There is no better verification to this customarily denied fact than what happened soon after that symposium.    

By the seventies clinical psychoanalysis was well founded and extended its domination on several well-established professions like psychiatry, for instance. It also found a place in academia but not in the programs that could have adopted it to link firmly with the university. Yet, something ‘unexpected’ actually happened: the superficial cracks in the British society were no longer mere personal disagreements but were fundamental theoretical differences. The same happened in France but the Lacanian group gave the splits a different flavour: it was a conflict between something  fascinating but does not promise stability and continuity of staid scholarly revision of the Freudian theory. In the US the ‘schools’ accepted coexistence almost creating a federal system of psychoanalysis, yet there were also very novel approaches to long  ignored psychical issue like the psychosomatics, the narcissistic disorders and the borderline conditions. As far as I know, psychoanalysis in South America leaned toward accepting a coexistence of the Kleinian the Lacanian approaches. The diversities of views in the international scene of psychoanalysis were threatening an imminent disintegration of the psychoanalytic organization. Wallerstein as the president of the IPA suggested to accept in principle of psychoanalytic plurality (1989). The schools, as I mentioned in the first part, where not theories of analysis, or new trends in practice; they were the adopting new aspects of the human phenomenon and working on them as main issues in the psychoanalyzing the human subject (interpersonal relations, intersubjective interactions, with contemporary conflicts, etc. In other words, psychoanalysis was no longer a unified theory, but remained a system of training. What is peculiar about that is neglecting the fact that training cannot stand alone but has to be "training in something". So, if psychoanalysis is not a unified theory then we should end up with different kinds of training. This is not the case. We ended up with three training modalities for several schools pf psychoanalysis. Once again the mere concept of training is the force behind the unity of the psychoanalytic organization. Could we have one way of prayer that fits all our religions?

At this point I need to underline an idea that might not sit well with some (many!). After Freud’s death it did not take long for his ‘presumably’ unified theory to fragment. It is easy to use a psychoanalytic template to relate that to the death of the father, so on and so forth. The fact of the matter is that psychoanalysis came with the finding of the unconscious to make the human subject a viable subject for understanding, thus opened the way for disagreements about his understanding. The maturation of the psychoanalytic movement proved that psychoanalysis is a multifaceted approach to the study of the human subject and not a simple one unified discipline. The notion of psychoanalytic plurality became a licence to form schools, which camouflages the fact that psychoanalysis is the science of the human subject and not the amalgam of points of view regarding him the. It is important to bring to attention that all those schools maintained the concept of training with its tripartite structure, and the society and the IPA as the mother of the institutes. In other but more revealing words: the divisions in psychoanalysis kept training and the institutes model as the bubble that keeps outsiders out of the psychoanalytic community.  The revelation that psychoanalysis is not a unified theory should have made analysts look closely into their basic premises and decide if they should follow the training system of the unified Freudian theory or adjust their training to the future practice of their premises.

There was no time in its history when psychoanalysis when a unified theory engendered agreement between all its members. I think that psychoanalysts upheld the idea that psychoanalysis is a matter of training-whatever their theoretical affiliations-to maintain that it could be done only in the IPA institutes. This attitude admirable as it was and still is came on the expense of psychoanalysis itself: it is no longer of any recognizable features, identity, or even professional weight due to putting the emphasis on preserving the institution and not psychoanalysis itself.  Instead of going on articulating the obvious without clear aim to my effort I will give my opinion as I have reached it over several decades of gradual change from a dedicated and loyal advocate of psychoanalysis to becoming a candidate then an analyst and moving to being a training and supervising analyst and finally, now I am back to where I was at the beginning: a dedicated and loyal advocate of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis would force the honest clinician to admit that it is a science of the subject, i.e. it is not just a technique to be trained to use. Better, since analysts could practice psychoanalysis by choosing different psychological manifestations to work with, then psychoanalysis is a branch of the humanities, i.e., psychoanalysis is a human science that covers the totality of the human subject and not only his interpersonal relations, his intersubjective dynamic, his conflicts, etc. Just because it was delivered by a physician and not a mid-wife it is neither a medical specialty nor just a method of treatment. All human sciences (even physical sciences too) started as a unified field to eventually reveal that it could branch out into specialties. Wundt’s and William James's psychologies are now  dozens specialties with links to dozens of specialties.  Acknowledging that psychoanalysis is human science requires realizing that, as such, it was destined to branch out into specialties that links with other sciences, not only idiographic ones. This idea would not find welcoming ears, not because it is wrong but because to comes close to several sensitive points in us. Psychiatrist would consider it a threat to their established privileged position in psychoanalysis. Other professions like psychology and social work, which are involved in the health providing services, would not like being grouped with other branches of the humanities that are not in the field of health services (education, sociology, politics, etc.). Nevertheless, it is not the lack of supporters for the idea of defining the 'genre' of psychoanalysis as idiographic science that would fail; it is the demand it puts on us (all) to revise the system of learning and training in psychoanalysis if psychoanalysis is considered a science in its own right.  

What would the learning and training in psychoanalysis be like if we, our training institutes, and the IPA accepted the idea that psychoanalysis-on its own- is a science and that training in its technique of psychotherapy is only one of its facets?