The Dilemma of Learning and Becoming an Analyst:

 

A. A basic problem:

There is a basic and elementary problem with psychoanalysis, that is only if psychoanalysts accept the obvious contradiction in their formation: there is a body of knowledge that is basic in the making and formation of the psychoanalyst, and there is another body of knowledge that is essential in the making of a therapist out of the psychoanalyst. The dilemma is that those two types of knowledges are not related in a natural way. There is no theoretical discussion in the Freudian text about the link between practice and the theory, nor dedicated works by the classical psychoanalysts about that link, nor the contributors to the classical theory from outside the analytic community. We have no notion -for instance-of the links between the material conditions of psychoanalysing, the practicing procedures of interpretation and construction. This loose situation in training is always an issue in supervision of candidate seeing patients for analytic work.   

Sometimes attaining those links becomes a difficult contradiction to deal with. Before explaining what I mean by that I remind the analyst who find my statement strange and negatively provocative that they make an issue of the link between theory and practice, so what I say is just stating the common concern in psychoanalysis as an issue that is part of the crises of the training analysts. Analysts are not settled yet on what is the theory of psychoanalysis and what is there of that theory that is essential for practicing it as psychotherapy. Since most analysts still do not want to realize or to acknowledge that they came to psychoanalysis from the back door of psychotherapy without enough knowledge of what that knowledge entails they confuse the practice of psychotherapy with psychoanalysis. Surgery is not medicine but medicine includes surgery.

This kind of obvious limited understanding of psychoanalysis led -eventually- to asking if psychoanalysis is a science or epistemology? The answer that came from the psychotherapist was that psychoanalysis is a science, while the answers that came from the thinkers of all kind was that psychoanalysis is a theory of the human subject and not essentially a psychotherapy. The reason- in my opinion- is the narcissism of the practicing analyst (his image in his own mind and not if he is sick or psychologically healthy). Protecting analysts see themselves as professional of an exceptional importance, therefore they like to believe that psychoanalysis is a science. Instead of curt remark here I prefer to ask: who is more scientific about the nature of the human psyche...... Eysenck or Bion?  

The issues that pertain to learning psychoanalysis and practicing are not as simple as they look in the apprenticeship institutes of psychoanalysis. Knowledge never ceases to advances and improves. The stubborn hanging on to the parochial IPA system of apprenticeship in specialized institutes is like insisting on learning medicine from the village's surgeon.