ONE: Revisiting the Call for Psychoanalysis in Academia.

A.            The need for evaluating the Present System of Training:

After more than a century- since establishing the first training institute in Berlin- it is normal to ask if the Institute System of Training is worthwhile maintaining or we should think of -at least- evaluate it systematically. Personally, I did not come across any methodical assessment of the tripartite system of Seminars (theory and literature), Personal Analysis ( therapy and personal experience), and Supervision ( learning in vivo). It has to be underlined that this system was an ingenious one when it started a century ago.

However, it may have become now less effectiveness if not even counterproductive. Personal analysis has created factions of candidates and training analyst that are not always !!!!!.The literature to study is also badly influenced by the same psychodynamics with the added factor of creating ‘schools’ of thought that are-sometimes- ‘falsely’ considered advancement of the main doctrine. Fewer papers are still adding to the body of knowledge because we do not have yet a defined understanding of psychoanalysis itself to make an objective assessment. Supervision is poorly monitored-in the diverse branches of the institutes- and candidates are not in the position to differentiate between good analysis and bad (is intersubjective psychoanalysis good or bad psychoanalysis?!).

Although those flaws are the natural products of years and miles of independent training centers, insistence on keeping training the responsibility of the IPA is the malignancy.

The IPA is supposed to be a membership association of people who are trained as psychoanalysts. It defies logic that the IPA is also the only source of training that it will accept or its graduates as members. A membership association has the right to recognize the institutions that meet the criteria of training, which it accepts  its membership. But it should not be running the training institution that it will qualify for its membership. This is said again, the IPA could set up the criterion of training that qualifies for its membership OR offer the training and let the boards of professional standards accept or reject their teaching but doing away with both.

Ignoring this very simple fact created the impression that getting the    of the IPA gives the member a professional status, which it does not. The court case of 1989 was considered a psychoanalytic advancement. Yet now, with an unbiased understanding of the situation in the USA , the judgment in that case was harmful to psychoanalysis because it did not make psychoanalysis a specialty but only a membership of sorts. So, it gave the IPA an implicit acceptance of its contradictory functions.

Before I get to that, to my knowledge nonmedical professionals in Europe were well accepted in the local psychoanalytic association without court cases. The reason is that psychoanalysis in Europe  was always the arena of thinkers and not of different fields of practice like psychiatry and clinical psychology. Although psychoanalysts practice psychoanalysis under the name of their basic professional license (because psychoanalysis is not a profession) we gave ourselves a special status. This is dangerous,  because the IPA is a society of peers and not a professional society.

The Necessary Change in the Content of Learning\Training Psychoanalysis:

The tripartite training system we all go through to specify our distinction from other colleagues of our specialty is not  defined strictly distinguish  to make that distinction. Each specialty in mental health professions could train its members in psychoanalysis and initiates its own membership organization. Then, an international psychoanalytic association be formed of members of different backgrounds in psychoanalysis. Membership  in an IPA takes place later and independently. It goes without saying or with saying very little that moving psychoanalysis to Academia will force(one day) that solution because psychoanalysis will become the main concern not the membership in its association that is what is sought after.

It remains to ask what would be the content of such body of association?

My answer now is that I know what should not be, but not -yet- what it should be. People of the caliber of Laplanche in France, and few I know about but miss their names in other European centers are qualified to answer this question. It is not only their personal potentials that qualify them but also the general scientific atmosphere of culture fill in many gaps.