A Need for a Theory of Practice and a System of Training

In a recent posting of the IPA, a colleague (sorry to have lost his name) underlined a ‘serious’ problem that pertains to both practice and the theory of practice. He underlined the absence of interest in childhood in the contemporary theory of psychoanalysis. He also related that disappearance to the disappearance of the issue of the intrapsychic in the field of its practice. The two issues are fundamentally and inherently connected. If we haven’t forgotten, we psychoanalysts who were the first to refer psychopathology to fixations on unresolved conflicts in childhood. We were also the ones who stipulated that correcting those fixations comes through analyzing their transference to the analytic process. Add to that that as this is the case, and was always so, training in psychoanalysis was more than just learning: it was forming a psychoanalytic mind in the candidate.

My colleague hit the nail on the head, but the nail needs more hitting…. because analysts-hopefully-still want the do the good and real work of psychoanalysis. But there is a problem with that. Until the late sixties of the last century learning and training were possible because the field was expanding in terms literature and fields of practice (psychosomatics, borderline cases, etc.). But thinkers from outside the field, and thinkers from inside the field, in addition to the change in the kind of cases that sought treatment, the development in psychology and linguistics, all those dug deeper and more complex strata of the human subject. Instead of getting more ‘psychoanalytic’ we neglected the two pillars of our discipline: childhood and its fixations, and transference and the intrapsychic.

What happened, eventually, is that the practicing psychoanalysts closed the door behind themselves and kept regurgitating their knowledge, leaving the thinkers advance psychoanalysis toward wider horizons while their world remained limited if not even shrunk. This subject is of more complexity and further horizon than what I am equipped to dela with. But I can and wish to go back to two or three topics that I raised before that are related to the issue our colleague has raised: The difference between having a vocabulary of psychoanalysis without having its language, and the difference between a psychoanalysis founded on deductive thinking and another that is inductive in nature.

Practicing analysts and even training analysts might think that this topic is too far from their own realm of practice and work. It is not. If they are doing good work, they would be actually using the right approach without being aware of it. The old vocabulary we still use and teach candidates will gain more meaning than when we were taught it. The fact that we know more now about what we did 'unconsciously' for a long time obliges us to learn how to convey that elaboration of psychoanalysis to the new generation AND keep ourselves aware of what we should be doing in our practice.

I hope to write two posts, one Transference and Interpretation and one on Inductive Thinking and Interpretation.