2. A Different Way of Saying the Same Thing

B. Learning Psychoanalysis:

The literature of psychoanalysis is immense and claiming that some of it are better than others is a foremost understatement. Nevertheless, I have to say something about that: a training endeavour has to do things: make a good choice of literature that makes it logical and easy for the candidates to fill the gap between theory and practice. It does not make sense to have a syllabus that mixes literature from two clearly different authors, or that has samples of the literature of different schools of psychoanalysis. The other point is making the same deliberate choice of Freud’s works. The really significant in the Freud S.E. is how he coined his terminology and how they were pregnant with the rich meanings that they have now. THIS WHAT I MEANT BY AN ACADEMIC SCRUTINIY OF TERMINOLOGY. Our vocabulary was a marvel when it was used in the psychoanalytic theory…new, revealing, full of a variety of meanings. With time (more than a century) it no longer has those qualities and lost anything that give them that insightful  distinction.

     Learning psychoanalysis is easy to identify as sudyining some foundational theoretical texts, but the important aspect in learning the literature is how the chosen literature is studied. Because psychoanalysis is originally an original way of perceiving and understanding common issues and giving more meaning to regular vocabularies a basic part of learning it is to be exposed to those specifics of psychoanalytic way of thinking. The good example to that distinction I am making about learning analysis is the difference between a thinker like P. Ricoeur’s understanding of ‘interpretation’ and Lacan’s style of interpretation. The difference is something to learn.

Therefore, the efforts to update psychoanalysis, theory and practice requires a serious and sharp attention to the gaps between theory and practice and how the candidate will bridge that gap.