1.The Moral Obligation of the Contemporary Psychoanalysts

In my opinion psychoanalysis in North America is living under a false name or already dead. In Europe and South America, it is living on low heart beat. If I do not have the statistics or the proofs to support my opinion the challenger of my judgement does not have the evidence to prove me wrong either.   

Being an old psychoanalyst, I strongly believe that my generation of psychoanalysts have a moral obligation to persuade, guide, and actively help getting psychoanalysis out from its current rot, to where it should flourish. It is difficult, yet there is no substitute for trying. The difficulty is that- we the old guys- have to recognize that we resisted the inevitable development and evolution of psychoanalysis and some of us (particularly in north America) preferred to come up with their personal views and claimed them appropriate to replacing the old with the new. They still call them psychoanalysis. In other parts of the world different things happened, but each area had its own style in modifying psychoanalysis and improvising its method to keep it breathing. They do not disclose easily its status and the IPA too keeps that as secrets. The psychoanalytic institutions hide the facts about psychoanalysis from the psychoanalysts !!!!.  Those attempts to replace a dying psychoanalysis have failed to actually fill its vacant place or revive it as substitutes. The most they did was postponing the inevitable.

I will address that point in another posting. But for now, I would say that we-psychoanalysts- helped preventing the death of psychoanalysis but did not do what should have been done to revive it. We always claimed that we are the custodians of psychoanalysis and limited any input from none analysts (none clinically inclined intellectual). Their contributions might have been useful but we did not take full advantage of them.

Secondly, there are two possible venues to revive psychoanalysis: to tinker with the present way analysis is transmitted from generation to another (training), make some tweaks in the its practice and use publicity to declare its improvement. The other venue is changing completely the way analysis is transmitted (education), declaring it a science and not a profession, then looking into what is left off it that could still be of significance. To do that we must move its base from the IPA accredited training institutes to academia, and making it either a program in the departments of humanities or even make it one of the departments of the humanities in the university.In a very recent posting it was found out that the programs of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic subjects in some universities were in big demand in the departments of human studies that was offering them. In some large and reputable universities there was waiting lists to register in those programs. I had an old experience (1964-1969) that convinced me- in that early time- that psychoanalysis would have a very welcomed and prosperous place in the departments of psychology at universities.

Experienced and old analysts like me oppose making the shift from training (acquiring a skill or a trade) to learning and obtaining an academic degree in a branch of knowledge (enough to qualify for a licenced profession). We -old analysts-cannot forget that when we went to learn psychoanalysis, we were already highly reputed professionals in our fields. Teaching psychoanalysis in universities will let teenagers do what we considered for a long time a privilege that we should cherish. We do not notice that those youngsters have to learn much more than what was available to learn in our time, and they will be the analysts who will do the real research in psychoanalysis. We also resist to acknowledge that psychoanalysis in academia (with the graduate and post graduate levels of studies) will open it to more than just the field of psychotherapy. In Europe some universities were dedicated to open doors for psychoanalysis but mainly in psychotherapy. The IPA institutes in those countries maintained their traditional functions, which blurred the difference between learning and training. A leap from training in parochial and archaic institutes to learning in open well-connected departments of the humanities will be faced by our resistance, but eventually the resistance will collapse. When that happens, it will be our duty to participate in introducing good psychoanalysis to the universities. It will be our duty to participate and contribute to putting psychoanalysis where it should have been three decades ago.

An additional thing to do is to give the IPA a specific period of time to wind down its role in psychoanalytic education and  to improve its function as a membership institution.