Addendum 

The response to this posting made me think of adding an addendum to it. It is about few things to consider if there is an intention to approach the local university about introducing psychoanalysis to its interested students. The addendum is not a set of advises but only mentioning things to consider.

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Approaching a university department to allow few lectures on psychoanalysis is better done through the local psychoanalytic institute or society rather that by individual initiatives. It makes it an organization addressing an organization.

The involved local psychoanalytic body should discuss and design an approach to the departments of psychology, sociology and social work (psychiatry !) and prepare:1. Individual lectures- at the beginning of the academic year as 'general knowledge'. 2. if there is interest in the subject the local psychoanalytic body should design and advertise a series of 3-5 lectures in certain topics to be offered in the different social and cultural activities in the allied departments (Dreams, transference, interpretation, etc.). 3. The involved analysts should make themselves available to the faculty in the concerned departments to help in post graduate theses, both with ideas, theoretical suggestions, and readiness to help with the literature. 
This last point demands from us some humility and desire to know more about certain areas that we actually know very little ( the emergence  of the sense of being in children and how it evolves.  It is an invitation to cooperation.  

Having a framework of cooperation and performing it without making the revival of psychoanalysis our ‘hidden’ purpose of approach could lead in a natural way to making psychoanalysis a valuable addition to the academic program that is accepting it as a guest or as a trial.

I am worried-though- about three things:

A. I expect good immediate response, which could make the analysts in such project to quickly think that students are future patients, and they start upholstering their couches. This will kill the project instantly. Our lectures in such a project should be about psychoanalysis, what it has discovered about us\them, and not about the neurotic cousins.  It is important not to let our present predicament colour our approach to introducing psychoanalysis to academia. We have to be aware that it will take few years to make it natural to be part of the curricula of those departments. Most importantly, moving toward academia is a step in the direction of changing psychoanalysis as it is learned and be trained now and finding a new and better psychoanalysis.  

B. Young and recently trained analysts did not learn psychoanalysis well because both they and their training faculty were interested in the contributions of the new schools. We have to agree or disagree about this point to decide what is  fundamental in the psychoanalysis we will introduce and avoid creating confusion about us. My view is that there is nothing psychoanalytic of any form in the new schools of psychoanalysis (since Kohut). The basic and foundational is the theory of psychodynamic is: the centrality of the working of the primary processes, interpretation, analysis of transference; NOT of relations, reconstruction that links the past with the present, revealing to the patient the presence of his childhood fixations in his present conflicts.  Those points could be the source of very interesting lecture to the public, and could show that psychoanalysis is about our daily life, and there is more to learn about it and more contribution it could offer other human sciences.

C. It is VERY important that the faculty in those department know that we are not there to compete with them, find new patients, belittle their specialties, etc. we are there to contribute in an educated way to their efforts.

3. Where to Learn Psychoanalysis:

A.    Deviating and Getting Lost:

The reason I wanted to emphasize that psychoanalysis is not a profession is a wrong attitude we take from the training we get in IPA institutes. For us-trained psychoanalysts-whenever the term psychoanalysis is mentioned it meant what we learned in the institutes of psychoanalysis. The fact is that we were supposed have learned everything about psychopathology and many aspects of psychoanalysis in our professional degrees, so what we would learn in those institutes should have been the technique of practicing psychoanalysis. In other words, the institutes were for training us in the skills of psychoanalyzing. The skills are how and what to listen to (notice, observe, sense, etc.) in order to discover the unconscious elements in what we are hearing. Listening like psychoanalysts should lead to interpreting the new psychical meaning that emerges from what we discovered during our listening, and use it skillfully to make the patient recognize what else he has said (painted, did, meant, etc.) without being conscious of it. In addition to leaning this skill we learn how to reconstruct to the patient his psychical life as one comprehensive LIFE. Without noticing the difference between learning a skill and training in a new profession we created a major distortion in the concept of training; training became an objective not a means to an objective. This was the downfall of psychoanalysis as the subject matter of our professional endeavours and the worsening of the practice of that deteriorating (deteriorated) theory.

The IPA institutes were not and still are not the ideal place to learn psychoanalysis. The candidates of sixties and the mid-seventies learned most of the theory of psychoanalysis before they applied to the training programs. Most of us had training- analyst who were actively participating in expanding and sophisticating ‘psychoanalysis’. They stimulated in us the interest in learning what psychoanalysis has added to our knowledge as psychologists and psychiatrist. Therefore, we never lost our connection with our original formation and became more interested in the theory psychoanalysis. Sadly, this attitude changed when training in IPA institute became a short cut to a practice in the mental health profession. Psychoanalysis changed from being a skill that could complement our original professions to a profession in its own right. There is something basically wrong in that change: psychoanalysis was supposed to be the source of the knowledge that we seek training in the skills to use it, to understand the patient and make the patient understand himself. What happened instead is a major mistake: training analysts ignored the difference between learning and training and gave themselves the right to be both: trainers and professors. This point was not examined thoroughly enough when the problem of the training analysts was highlighted last few years in desperate efforts to solve the negative impact of that created status on training. 

Unconsciously, we sleepwalked into a trap we set for ourselves: we blurred the difference between psychoanalysis as knowledge and as practice (in ALL respectable professions the clear and sharp difference between knowledge and practice is a fundamental feature). The outcome was a gradual deterioration in both psychoanalytic knowledge and its practice. As I mentioned in the last part of this posting: psychoanalysts referred the crisis of the continuing drop of interest in psychoanalysis to misconceptions about it, due to people’s ignorance of MODERN psychoanalysis. The issue is that the crisis of psychoanalysis is due to the poor quality of modern psychoanalysis, which is a result of the poor quality of training in the IPA institutes; what else!!!!!

B.     The Restoration of the Reputation of Psychoanalysis:

Psychoanalysis was born with a very good reputation. From the beginning, which we all know, the initial refutations on moral basis and the medical professions attacks on its findings, did not sway people and the many young aspiring physicians from seeing something futuristic in it. In a nutshell, psychoanalysis had all the features that made people realize that it talked to them about what they knew to be right, because they could see it in themselves and in other people. Psychoanalysis was a theory of the subject and not a theory of “something” and needed to have the evidence to prove its believability; it was a theory of us and them and that did not need to look for confirmation of its discoveries. After a short while Freud introduced metapsychology and was tempted to use its language to create a new vocabulary for his observations, and to give them some abstract meaning. It still was relevant to people’s direct observations and understanding of the subject. Close to the end of being in charge of theorizing for psychoanalysis Freud formulated a metapsychology that was basically a reification of his findings (ego-psychology). Yet, unnoticeably, he corrected that deviation in his work “Inhibition, symptoms, and anxiety”, a work that did not catch much attention, mainly due to it heuristic discussion of the cause-effect nature of psychological phenomena. Freud’s psychoanalysis was a theory that was stemming partially from his clinical experience and mainly from true and valid observations and understanding of the subject (there is no clinical reason for Freud to have discovered the super-ego, except that the presence of the Ego was not enough to explain all the conscious faculties of the subject. The ego had to have a metapsychological addendum to explain other function its direct presence in the subject. Thus, he had to work out a place for that addendum in his metapsychology.

In my view, psychoanalysis until Freud was alive and a little after his death was distinguished and deserved its respectability. Psychoanalysis’s main concern was knowledge about a subject. Even when the conflict between the Freudians and the Kleinians emerged the subject matter remained the same and psychoanalysis preserved its distinguished status. The controversies did not reduce the value of the arguments; in a subtle way the issue was what would explain the other: does metapsychology explain psychology (Anna explains Melanie) or does psychology generate metapsychology[aF1]  (Melanie as the basis of Anna)?  Even the French controversies did not reduce psychoanalysis to mere personal disagreement: Lacan was trying to give psychoanalysis its ‘Structural’ identity and dissipate the functional point of view but went about it in provocative way.

   It is when some of Freud’s early and ardent supporters (Stekel, Jung, Rank, Ferenczi, etc.), started to argue about technique that psychoanalysis entered into a downward spiral. There are ‘possible’ causes for that feature in psychoanalysis. The first is that analysts who narrowed their views and limited them to matters of practice were usually either victims of over confidence in their knowledge of the foundational knowledge of psychoanalysis, and argued from a false position of regarding psychoanalysis a theory that has reach the point where it stopped growing, and they knew it well enough to ignore evolving it further.  The second, matters of technique relate to training and not knowledge. IPA institutes are not built to graduate psychoanalyst, they are supposed train psychoanalyst to practice psychoanalysis; their function (with time) changed to graduating clinical practitioners presuming that they also learn psychoanalysis in the process. Training in those institutes in the best case is to teach enough of psychoanalysis that makes training in the technique possible.

Where then could someone learn psychoanalysis?

C: Psychoanalysis as an Academic Issue:

 Answering this question is not a simple one. To evaluate answering this question properly we need to clarify the attitude of the ones who answered it: do they believe that psychoanalysis could be learned without the clinical aspect considered, or there is no psychoanalytic knowledge outside or without the clinical component. If the answering person believes that learning psychoanalysis is meant to prepare the candidate for clinical practice then the IPA institutes, or the equivalent, is the place to go. If the answer comes from an intellectual (physician, social worker, psychologist, drama teacher, etc.) it will be: go to an academic institution that has intellectuals with various interest in the human subject to study psychoanalysis well, where they know how to transmit knowledge to their students. Although some academic institutions did and still do that (though mainly for psychoanalysis as a therapeutic act) they did not take it as a branch of the humanities, or as a significant aspect of psychology in general. 

Psychoanalysis is knowledge that hast to be protected and given the opportunity to be recognized as such, expand to reach its own extent of capability and eventually change psychology as it is taught now in universities, and is involved in psychiatry and social work. By adding psychoanalysis to the existing psychology in academia makes the nature of the human subject more coherent and easily shared by all the branches of sciences that deal with the human subject. However, this kind of change and its extent is not possible without a radical change unrelated to the   psychoanalysts. We, the old and older generation, have to realize that a change in direction in the way psychoanalysis is understood, transmitted to newer generations, setup to relate to other burgeoning human sciences, branching out into different areas of interest outside the clinical aspects, and becoming ‘knowledge’ in its own right and it is not just those mystical things that are available only in the IPA institutes training system, those changes have to happen to us first with sincere intention to give up the present system and make psychoanalysis an academic issue.

However, it is a challenge to expect such thing to happen. Twenty-five years ago, IPA acknowledged the existence of the present crisis. It did nothing more than convened committees ‘puzzled’ about it till now. It resorted lately boosting our moral and suggesting that it is trying and succeeding in containing the crisis. But the most glaring failure in its efforts is not telling the membership what its findings about the causes of the crisis (curing a disease without a diagnosis).  I cannot help wondering what is the undeclared opinion of the- elected- leadership of the IPA, and if they see hope in things improving spontaneously.

I think that sincere and serious analysts about the future of psychoanalysis should just bypass the psychoanalytic organization (s) and go ahead and try with acts of good faith make contacts with the academic institutions in their locations. In other terms we should admit and announce that we the analyst will save psychoanalysis without the permission or approval or even the support of its organizations. The individual attempts will prove to the hesitant analysts that nothing tangible is coming from the IPA; it has stand or opinion about the crisis.

What is of the utmost importance is to keep in mind that taking serious measure in this regard is to save psychoanalysis and not save us and our livelihood. We can survive without psychoanalysis but psychoanalysis cannot survive without well learned and trained analysts.  

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 [aF1]

2. The fallacy of Psychoanalysis is a Profession:

The concern about the survival of psychoanalysis in North America is directly related to the numbers of patients seeking psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The numbers have dropped and are still dropping. The drop in other parts of the world, maybe, not as bad but enough to raise the alarm about the future of psychoanalysis. The concern about the future of psychoanalysis goes back to 1995 when the IPA tried-officially- to understand the reasons for that drop and could not do anything about it for the last twenty-five years. Therefore, my argument about the issue is that the shrinking status could be more serious in some parts of the world more than others, but the crisis is universal all the same. The crisis as it has been raised is clearly related to psychoanalysis as a profession and not psychoanalysis itself (as body of knowledge), because what concerned the IPA all along and the regional and the local societies is the dwindling numbers of analysts, candidates, and patients without any concern about ‘what is practiced as a profession of psychoanalysis’.

The IPA has a membership of forty-eight (48) societies (one fourth of the countries in the world). It has 12797 member and 5434 candidates in training. This means that in average each society has 267 analyst and 113 potential future members. Could those figures qualify psychoanalysis to call itself a profession; or even a profession that might have future? No. By no means we can claim that psychoanalysis is a profession, in the real sense of the word, with those numbers. Not even when the number jumps few hundreds or a couple of thousands in a society it still not qualified to be called a profession. This rigidity is because those figures were double, and in some places triple the present numbers, i.e., if psychoanalysis is a profession, it is a dying profession. Any successful profession grows stronger with time as when psychoanalysis did the first forty years of its history but started to die forty years ago. In my opinion, reviving psychoanalysis is not difficult but restoring psychoanalysis as a profession is not possible anymore, unless something be done to psychoanalysis itself.  It was wrong from the beginning to pay attention to the practice of psychoanalysis and neglect the looseness in regard to the modification introduced to the theory in the guise of developing and improving its practice.

We have to solve an additional problematic in the crisis. We-the clinal psychoanalysts- are the ones who turned the fundamental discovery of the twentieth century and the pillar of the Western civilization into something very unidentifiable as a body acknowledge. Better, we analysts kept working on therapeutic of psychoanalysis claiming to improve it, turning it into a profession. We became contented with having an international organization that gave memberships to the practicing psychoanalysts without any examination or investigation of the quality of the theory they practice. Assuming the right to training analysts, the IPA was happy to increase the number of training institutes without any serious examination of the nature, content and quality of the training offered and the training faculties. No wonder we realized the serious problem with the status of the training- analyst and were unable to deal with it.

  Psychoanalysis in its mightiest time as a profession in the sixties and seventies of last center was-in fact and better judgment- less important or significant compared with the discoveries it generated during that period of time. It continued rejuvenating the Western culture. In that period of time psychoanalysis penetrated all the cultural and social aspect of the culture. It positioned itself in the midst of the revived intellectual life after WWII. To clarify what I mean I would that discovering that dreams are wish fulfillment is far more important than interpreting a dream in a psychotherapy. Realizing that symptoms have meaning gave the society a new sense of the structural nature of our psychological nature, instead of the previous preoccupation with causes and effects. Psychoanalysis and some psychoanalysts positioned structuralism in the humanities and created the advancements we are enjoying right now.

It is a moral obligation to revive psychoanalysis before it totally dies because it belongs to our civilization and not to us as clinicians. Morality and moral obligation are offshoots of responsibility. Our moral responsibility to save psychoanalysis from its impending death comes from the fact that we, and nobody or anything else have caused it to go dying: who or what else? Psychoanalysis, as was conceived by none clinicians and we did not consider ‘real’ psychoanalysis kept changing, getting better and more comprehensive. The changes in education, in child rearing, accepting the idea of latent meaning in ordinary speech, etc., kept developing, expanding and improving its basic premises, without input from the organization of psychoanalysis (the IPA). The theory of psychoanalysis was shaping the society while we stagnated or went afar from the essential discovery. There is an undeniable fact related to that: when we stopped building the theory of the subject there was nothing left for us to do but to turn our attention to its practice as psychotherapy. We lost our bearings. Clinical psychoanalysis as practice has a profession and practitioners, but psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge and a theory of the subject has thinkers, philosophers, scientists, practitioner in a wide range of other specialties. Just to give a glaring example: it has movies and theater to practice.

Psychoanalysis is not the profession of psychotherapy.

All analyst without exception have professions that preceded bestowing on themselves the title psychoanalysts. We all have obtained university degrees that qualified us to apply to training in IPA institutes of psychoanalysis. This is not facetious remark or just an argumentative ploy. We have to have professional rights in the mental health field to have access to training in psychoanalysis. Therefore, we mislead, mostly ourselves, when we do not acknowledge this fact. If we miss this fact, we should then allow anyone with a recognized profession (psychology, law, history of arts, commerce, etc.) apply and get training in psychoanalysis and bestow on himself the title psychoanalyst; and practice it. The criteria for accepting people in training was loose but got tightened up gradually to be limited to mental health professionals: psychology, psychiatry and social work (the details are not relevant to what I am to underline). However, some institutes, when they felt the pinch, and under some pressures from the training committees and the influence of some senior analysts accepted some none health providers in training (I know few cases in the Canadian Society). Those members, if they are truly good, are wealth to any society and this trend should be encouraged. But they should not be permitted to see patients based on their training in the IPA institutes only.  

Discussing this point is of crucial importance, because it puts psychoanalysis in its proper place. If the mental health provider, who is trained in psychoanalysis feels competent to do psychotherapy he should do that on his own initiative that is rooted in his own professional background. However, there is more to psychotherapy than what the IPA institutes provide. Practicing psychoanalysis (psychotherapy) should not be authorized by the IPA and its institutes. What I mean is that we should not link practicing psychoanalysis to training in IPA institutes but to really learning psychoanalysis both theory and technique and having the right to deal with patients. This issue should addressed this point: is 2000-2500 hours of training in IPA institutes (excluding personal analysis) enough to make ‘anyone’ learn psychoanalysis (as a body of knowledge and technique)? I training in IPA institutes adequate for all of us-irrespective of our backgrounds- be learn what it takes to practice psychoanalysis?  The answer is no, not enough whatever the numbers are. This is not a matter of how long training has to last to reach its objective. The issue is that when we go for training, we should integrate psychoanalysis with what we already learned in our specialty, not adapt our specialty and basic profession to psychoanalysis. I learned psychoanalysis when I was already a clinical psychologist. My profession as diagnostician by way of psychometric testing did not change or was modified by psychoanalytic training; maybe I became more particular in interpreting the patient’s psychometric profiles, and maybe I improved my understanding of some of the cognitive functions that I deal with in interpreting the patient’s associations. But, training in psychoanalysis was to learn the body of knowledge called psychoanalysis, which could allow me do psychotherapy in a special way. Psychoanalysis was never my profession.

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.

In the same spirit of my post about the present glorious times of a world going through change I want to add a couple of short paragraphs.

I was in Portugal lately. I followed a very significant European political event: the electing of the Parliament of the EU 28 countries for the next five years. Over 500 million subjects (old friends a foes) electing more than seven hundred representatives based on each country's independent political system. No procedural glitches, whatsoever. The dazzling thing is the role of the young is playing in the  different countries and changing the face of the world there. The greens got rid of the central right and left parties. One of the leaders of the new movement is a 16 years old young woman with all the bright, mature, self confidence that we did not see in the "seasoned" politicians of Brexit  and anti-Brexit. A child of Eight manged to make Starbucks stop plastic straws. In the US we  watched something similar but on a smaller scale when school shooting happened and issue of the climate were mentioned in opposition to the knowledge and wisdom of Trump and his likes. The call for free education, health services, substantive changes in social justice is gaining recognition and strength in the States by pressure coming from teenagers and young people.

This is more than a phantasy for a guy who lived and still remembers the war in Europe and in East Asia, initiated by "old experienced politicians" (Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin, Franco, Charles De Gaulle, Mao, Minh, etc.). In history, the history of of any human issue, the young start the revolutions and  pressure for change but the old usurp the revolutions, and here we go again. But it seems that this is not happening anymore. The young are moving and holding to the reigns of power.

 Could we see something similar in psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis is also dying like old politics. We, old analysts,talk about the need for change and we just give it a lip service (maybe this the only part we could still move). Young analysts  learned only the old analysis we taught them, in the same archaic institutes system, and infused in them the distorted image of the training analyst. The desperate needs for modernizing psychoanalysis expressed in "schools" were even more destructive because the schools were not dealing with the subject of analysis; they were distortions in its practice: from empathy to inter-subjectivity. The schools are the old hanging on to the straws that were  the first indication of a sinking psychoanalysis.
  
Young analysts have no ideology to call a revolution and renewal. How could they assume the leadership in changing psychoanalysis or holding back the old dying psychoanalysis? They should know that we have nothing to offer, so they have to look at two things: why they want to be analysts, and that analysis is not matter of training. It is a knowledge, a theory of "something", and they will find it in psychoanalytic literature not in training based on transmitting knowledge from a person to person. Is it too much to expect a generation of psychoanalysts who say that we will stop doing analysis as psychotherapy and we will look for new, different, meanings to the act of psychoanalyzing? "We want to be analysts because it is knowledge we aspire to learn, not a profession we want to practice. It is too much to find enough young analysts who are trained by us-the old parochial-training analysts, who would say out loud: analysis is not psychotherapy?? Analysis is....something else and we will find ways to learn it. There are some actual analysts who are knowledgeable of what psychoanalysis is who would extend a helping hand.

The hope-and there should be some left- is some psychoanalysts who hold academic positions will bring it where they work as academics, making it an academic issue and not a 'professional' matter. The hope is to take reign  of matters and not leave it to us the old cadre. We will not allow But even resist) our ways to be pushed aside and a new true knowledge of psychoanalysis emerge.
Things change, that is the normal course of events. Change needs new and daring people who know what is wrong with the present and take that as the starting point of finding the future. 
Why not psychoanalysis too?

A Glorious Time to Live:

Psychoanalysts tend to think of the unconscious as material existing outside realm of consciousness. The unconscious material exists in consciousness but in a disguised way, and that what makes it unconscious. We are supposed to be trained to decipher those disguises and restore the material to its original state. Treating a patient requires discovering the disguise and revealing it to the patient, so he could do with it what he wishes. Social groups do something similar with their matters, i.e., disguising their willingness or unwillingness to change; similar but not the same. We are presently living a period of history where change is not limited to one aspect of our life or one place in the world. There is a mass of processes of social change going on everywhere with different degrees of urgency. Yet, there is something unique about that world awakening.  

The world is going through major changes that are different from equally drastic changes that happened before. Before, every step forward taken by humanity involved resistance, which we can see around us again in different degrees of intensity. Social resistance to change in the past manifested itself in to changes resulted in more need for changing the changes that happened. The German reaction to the Versailles surrender created changes that needed changes in a second war. War was always the most used measure for resisting change or paying for the change in advance. The equivalent to that in psychotherapy is named resistance, which made change in most of the times a war with the therapist as an enemy.

The current changes are different because they are mostly done in conditions of peace or done peacefully (with the exception of the changes in the Islamic world). Living in north America, watching the changes that are happening in the US lately, and knowing few things about its impact on other parts of the world (middle east for instance) urge me to mark some features that could be of interest to analysts regarding social disguising of intentions and meanings (social unconsciousness).

 The current happenings in the US are both political and social changes that will soon be in history books and be read about only in books. It is a privilege to be close by and witness that change. To witness the change is better than anything written about it. The change in the US will ‘eventually’ have a remarkable effect on the world. They are political changes but they are more of a change in the nature of the American nation itself; an important nation that had a central place in the events of at least the last century. It is also a nation which has shown obstinate rejection to change in the past and blind adulation of its forefathers, consequently of itself. The significance of the recent changes in the US are not a simple process of maturation; they are creating a different perspective for a past that was hastily judged to create a great deal of distortions of the meaning of events. Americans changes  will definitely have an impact on a wide range of the world when they reach their Zenith.  Just as a start to put all that in perspective: A nation that-few decades ago- would not elect the better candidate for president just because he was Catholic is now open to elect a Jewish Socialist; that was when few months ago the word socialism and few other terms were anti American and taboos .

Changes of such nature and extent have to be put in a context; any context- but not to be looked at just as incomprehensible unusual turn of events. Fredrick Engels, after an extensive and very intelligent analysis of the course history usually takes in its progress, stipulated that History evolves in a dialectical spiral. Small events happen in what seems a casual way and reactions to the whims of some political characters or local events. They accumulate (unconsciously to the individuals) leading to the day when a deciding event or events that relate in a clear way to the innocuous events that happened casually before. Then, and suddenly, the society takes note of that deciding event and it becomes a historical moment; i.e., a historical thesis. The historical thesis creates its antithesis and both initiate a sweeping historical change. Minor and individual events, relating to racial discrimination, kept happening (the multiple events that took place in the US from the times of eliminating school segregations to the wave of open objections to police brutality with blacks) till 9\11 happened and the whole narcissistic edifice collapsed: ‘we are not what we always thought that we are’. Then, suddenly BOOM, the election of a black president.

The election of a black president was not the only available reaction to the American nation in its struggle against racial discrimination, but it was the antithesis that proved to be essential for other changes to continue advancing and not die sooner than it should. The US changed radically when Obama was elected: no more prefabricated ideas of the supposedly right president for ‘us’, maybe no prefabricated ideas about ‘our’ social life as whole as well. Following the election of a black president a wave of breaking old taboos became a national obsession. The idea of the white peoples’ entitlement over the blacks, or the entitlement of some groups over the rights of their opposites (poor, uneducated, homosexuals, woman, etc.) was a national game. However, to appreciate social change properly it has to be put in the context of what was to be changed. In that case, the context that made electing a black president significant was declaring the readiness to give up sacred and very old dear and sacred elements of life that were gripping the nation’s. Those fixed notions were a core of a sense of moral superiority. It meant that some unquestioned sacred beliefs and convictions are now merely debatable 

The Americans looked back at their past, and the present, and possibly the future, especially after the 9\11 drama, and became aware of a tendency to create pervasive unquestionable and blind senses of righteousness. It took more time for the American to become aware that they are not entitled to run the world according to their own sense of what is right and what is wrong. It was also a shock to realize that there are other and better ways of doing things than their own. Americans are open now to “not despise’ what is not American. It was difficult to come to acknowledge that some blacks could be better than an American white. The most important aspect in those changes is how the Americans basic ideological sense of being is founded on those same principles they believed that they have followed all the time. The whole world was also waking up to its bundles of prejudices. The way Nelson Mandela was received in Great Britain was far different from how Ghandi was received eighty years before.

What we can see in the US is an obvious (not yet fully sincere) trend to be just a part of the world, not only its leader. It goes without saying that the impact of that kind of change is so new and unfamiliar to the three generation living now in the US and the rest of the world to appreciate its future effect. The impact of change in the US on the Western world and the rest of it is very significant because it has already made great progress in eliminating dictatorship in the world. There is something ironic in this phenomenon. Dictators of the past suspended the constitutions of their countries to rule without opposition; they did not break the law. In the US the present elected president is trying to “constutionalize” dictatorship.

Analysts should study social phenomena psychoanalytically and not use psychoanalysis to explain social phneomena.

Psychoanalysis: Between Improving and Changing

6-7. University or Total Extinction.

The drop in the number of patients in psychoanalytic practice overwhelms psychoanalysts but highlights something not mentioned yet in our discussions of the crisis.  Psychoanalysts are certified professionals in three mental health professions (medicine, psychology, social work), and could practice their original professions along with a practice in psychoanalysis, and keep fully busy. However, psychoanalysts - almost always- refuse to consider their basic profession part of their pronounced identity as ‘psychoanalysts’. So, the crisis is really in psychoanalysis as a dying profession and not in its practice as a way of making a living. Analysts expected psychoanalysis to guaranty their practice, and did not pay enough attention to the gradual decline of its quality. In addition, they did not assume their responsibility for making the changes that would make it remain viable in practice. They preferred tinkering with it to accommodate their own preferences in practice. Freud’s tripartite protocol of practice demands strict discipline that some analysts could not bare, so they allowed themselves to do away with it, and in some cases to an objectionable degree.

The IPA did something similar: it relied on its membership to maintain its relevance, but it abandoned its responsibility to preserve psychoanalysis and allowed gradual divergences to become serious deviations. There is no honest and solid argument that would deny that the current crisis in psychoanalysis was and still is a crisis in the training and the formation of the psychoanalysts in the different specialised institutes of psychoanalysis. We might have now a crisis in the practice of psychoanalysis because of bad training psychanalysis in unsupervised institutes. The result of this possibility does not need any comments. What will happen in the next decade??  In 1966 there was a funny movie with the title “The Russians are Coming…The Russians are Coming”. I will use the title to say The Chinese are coming…The Chinese are coming. They will come in the tens of thousands and will- to the delight of the IPA- inflate its membership. Do we know much about their training and the training systems they will adopt after they anticipate from our present contribution to their preparation!

Unfortunately, and maybe fortunately, the crisis is the making of the IPA and its members, and not created by external factors. So, we can improve the situation if we want to, and if we will be able to take care of the unconscious resistance to change. The possible resistance will come from pride or guilt. The report of the IPA in 1995 poured the blame on outside forces that were even used to justify deviating from the traditional system of training. The report gave excuses for the analysts’ inaction and characterised those excuses as resistance to lowering the standards of classical practice to accommodate the presumed outside forces. In fact, the seeds of denying our responsibility for the crisis were already there in the report. The authors of the report predicted further decline in the number of patients, but were disagreeing on the causes: is it because of the continuing strictness of the, criteria or the tendency to relax those guidelines. The statements of the report and what materialized after its publication was denoting persistence of pride exemplified in we know better if we should change our techniques or not, and that we also know how. Obviously, we did not and still do not know. Guilt comes form admitting that we did not improve training but actually allowed it to decline and deteriorate. Realizing, admitting, and accepting all that requires courageous honesty. A review of the training systems in the last three decades would lead to admitting harmful deviation from original psychoanalysis to accommodate some ‘idealised’ training analysts who perpetuated to chronic belief that psychoanalysis is the ‘creation’ of individual geniuses. This tendency is very glaring in North America, but we should not forget the Lacnian waive and crisis of the short sessions crisis.

The crisis of psychoanalysis is a crisis of the formation of the analyst and confusing learning and training on one side, and practice and the analytic body of knowledge on the other. Some analysts do not make much of the separateness of those two opposites.

A Case for Change

It is problem nowadays is to agree on what psychoanalysis is, although there is an abundance of activities that calls itself psychoanalytic. Moreover, no organization, not even the IPA, has attempted or claimed the right or the ability to arbitrate that complex problem. Therefore, psychoanalysis-as a term- could currently be bestowed on none psychoanalytic activities without reservations, and psychoanalysis, this way, could exist (fictitiously) while it actually is not existent. But there is twist in that quasi-excuse or accusation. Analyst from the three professions, mentioned above, know that if psychoanalysis (to others) is only psychotherapy then they, as the psychotherapists, have to answer this question: What do we treat? We cannot say we treat pathological conditions because such conditions are not separate from the patient like diabetes and the diabetic. If we say we treat patients with pathological conditions then we should complete our answer by specifying what is a pathological condition: what does it mean that a patient of character disorder is psychopathologically affected? How those affections show and manifest themselves in patients. All possible answers to those details in practice come from the lexicon of psychiatry because psychoanalysis does not have its own lexicon of psychopathology. I am doing this exercise in controlled thinking to show that we, psychoanalysts, have withdrawn to our institutes and our international organization in a self-feeding processes, which has a negative effect on training. We transformed the uniqueness of the psychoanalytic discoveries of a half a century into personal distinction that isolated us from the world of the humanities. We refuse to be clinical psychologists or social workers anymore and retreated to an identity that does not have a defined entity yet. We are psychoanalysts without a psychoanalysis that has a meaning: there is no surgery without medicine because medicine gives the surgeon his professional identity. In the same way we need to identify psychoanalysis to give us our identity as psychoanalyst. The reason I keep harping on this point is because the little body of knowledge that we assume to be enough to practice psychoanalysis is full of substantial mistakes that causes concern. Those mistakes could quickly and accurately be corrected if psychoanalysis is a university department or even part of a department of psychology in a university. Academic knowledge forces correctness because the academician is accountable to the body of knowledge not to his colleagues.

Lately (March 24, 2019) Mark Solms (who is in charge of the new revision and translation of Freud’s Standard Edition), chose 7-8 terms to show the audience of his lecture how wrongly they were translated by Strachey and caused fundamental distortions in understanding psychoanalysis. As an example, Ego is Ich or I in English. It is not “a thing” or a psychic entity: it is the pronoun of first person. There is no Ego to strengthen or to treat; there is Ich or the pronoun I that is speaking to us about itself. As the patient says I lose my concentration when my superior criticizes me, he is not saying I have a weak ego; he says to the analysts I lose my natural sense of being when attacked. This condition determines if the analyst should respond, and if so with what. Psychoanalyzing is the act of showing the patient that what he said had another implicit meaning which deserves talking about because it could be affecting him without being aware (not using the term unconsciously because there is nothing that could be called “the unconscious”). Unconsciousness is a metaphor of a state of mind and not a signified.

If our training does not lead us to what psychoanalytic knowledge has taught us about the subject we will be totally lost because, all what we would be left with is some fictitious metaphors about imaginary psychological issues, i.e., metaphors of real things. Most of the time the candidates do not have clear knowledge of what they treat or they consider the terminology that was improvised by Freud or other authorities ‘things in themselves’ (projection, enactment, failure to construct the right self object, etc.). Neglecting, in training and learning psychoanalysis to show the candidate (and sometimes full-fledged analyst) the difference between what they encounter in practice and what they read in the literature results in difficulties in the relationship between the candidate and the supervisor (another angle to deal with the problem of the training analyst). Those issues and several others make me say that those essential problems in learning and training could not be properly managed in the present system of training in the IPA institutes. There is a lot to know before we teach psychoanalysis properly, which the system of the intuited could not hadle. The possibility of changing learning and training to be an academic endeavour should be seriously considered in the psychoanalytic circle. 

The way analysts are qualified lacks two basics: a spelled-out statement about the minimum theoretical knowledge that a candidate has to acquire before applying for training, and reviewing the time and the manner the tarining time will be managed in the process of training. It goes without saying that the institutes should also have a clear theoretical program for the formation of the candidates. This point is meant to highlight the serious need to know what are the fundamentals of training and to exchange and discuss matters between the ‘different’ training facilities in different parts of the world. In my time -the Canadian Institute was four years of seminars (once a week for three hours each), of which the first two years were dedicated to the Slandered Edition, the other two years were for the contemporary schools. In addition, there was personal analysis and supervision. Thankfully, Kohut was the first and only enfant terrible in my time, so there was time to have deep discussions regarding the budding conflict between drive psychology and relational psychology. What would be the situation now with the dozen or so new schools?

The most puzzling now is the existence of very impressive university programs in psychotherapy designed, run, and managed by psychoanalysts. What is involved in those programs is far more expansive and of high quality than any IPA institute could accommodate in its current or past modality of training. The puzzlement is why those programs repeat the IPA mistake by limiting psychoanalysis to psychotherapy. There are all the reasons for academicians not to limit their conception of psychoanalysis to psychotherapy. The most glaring reason is that psychotherapy was not originally the only stipulation psychoanalysis, and that what is dying in psychoanalysis as psychotherapy? I am thinking of three reasons for that, and I mention them because I hope some analyst\academician will try to look into that matter: 1.we do not know what else could be psychoanalysis, 2. there is no demand to learn anything else but psychotherapy, 3. aside of psychotherapy psychoanalysis is just applications in other fields, which makes of less prestigious to include in an academic program.   

 However psychoanalysts want to cut it psychoanalysis is a theory of the human subject. Before psychoanalysis the human subject was subject of speculation that sometimes were nothing more than traditional believes. Since the birth of psychoanalysis speculating about a human phenomenon is not acceptable in the educated communities. Psychical phenomena-ranging from history to politics- are psychoanalysble, i.e., subjected to processes of understanding. Freud’s preliminary conceptions of the intrapsychic and his advancement of his points became our attitude toward the subject: an object of discovery and each discovery uncovers the next issue to study. Therefore, psychoanalysis is more than a psychotherapy: it is the study of the human subject.

The two other preconditions in a proper training are personal analysis [didactic] and supervision. I think those two preconditions which came from training in psychotherapy should be viewed in light of making psychoanalysis a separate and defined body of knowledge; a science. Personal analysis is essential in training as psychotherapist but, not for the chronic phantasy of its value as therapy and treatment. Any dictated personal psychoanalysis would not achieve any therapeutic success. However, we cannot learn how psychoanalysis is done by any other means but undergoing a good period of didactic personal analysis. Explaining that to the future aspiring clinician should put his mind in the right place. He would know how the clinical protocol is observed for the benefit of the “patient”, and how therapy is a natural result of that type of relation. It still has good effect on the trainees in other fields of psychoanalysis. Nothing could explain the unconscious as well as hearing one’s self saying things within regular speech that never occurred to his mind. Supervision is part of any work that is based on the accumulation of expertise. The varied circumstances in the dealing with psychopathology could also show the candidate the blind spots in his understanding of human nature.

                   The Negative Side of Institute Training

Training in IPA institutes is a lonely venture; it is analysts teaching analysts, training analysts qualifying analysts an accrediting their own work. Therefore, without a critical eye from outside, their closed circle is likely to take certain things within their sphere of knowledge as facts when they are not more than metaphors of findings. The institutes follow the divisions in the societies, which are mostly personal and political. The major dividing event in the British Society in the early fifties, resulted in three different systems of training based on a mix of personal and theoretical differences. The most negative result of this division was the creation of what was called drive psychology and relational psychology, following the rift between Anna Freud and M. Klein. Ego psychology was considered a drive psychology because it emphasized the psychodynamics of pressure and defence against the ‘instinctual’ demands. This conception was based on translating Trieb with instinct, which was blatantly wrong. Freud defined what he meant by Trieb “the pressure put on the mind to act [represent the stimulus psychically]” (1915c). For a period of time sex was a drive, but after considering infantile sexuality as basis of more than sexuality, sex was not treated anymore as a drive but as a Trieb. Making M. Klein the founder of relational psychology is a subtle but very important misconception. Klein examined, identified, understood, what happens to the child in infancy. She gave us a way to understanding the adult’s intrapsychic core that was influenced by the relationship he had with the mother in infancy. Her interest was the formation of the intrapsychic via the interrelationship with the care giver. In other terms, she was looking at psychical formations, not the relations to the mother. Other analysts who are grouped as Kleinians, like Winnicott, were interested in the transference of the infant-mother relationship to the current relationships, not the relationships themselves. They were not relationists; they were psychoanalysts.

Clinical psychoanalysts were isolated in their training institutes (particularly in North America) and were not exposed to the external input of a very important phase in the history of psychoanalysis. There was a revival in the sixties and the early seventies, in Europe and North America, of structuralism, which was the anti functional thinking in the humanities. Just as a side idea to this: Mark Solms main endeavour in revising Freud’s Standard Edition is meant to correct the translation of some basic terms that made psychoanalysis a functional theory. His corrections will be -as he indicated and demonstrated- to find the structural version of psychoanalysis in the Freudian text. In the sixties and seventies, the return to the essence of psychoanalysis allowed thinkers, philosophers, literary people, artists, etc., to participate in creating a structural version of psychoanalysis.  It seems that North American psychoanalyst missed that external input and remained captives of their institutes of clinical psychoanalysis. The harmful effect of training in isolated specialised institutes is evidenced in the North American psychoanalysis. When psychoanalysis was getting over its functional version in Europe and including a wider range analytic thinking,  psychoanalysts  in North America analysts were dealing with the limitations of functional psychoanalysis by being critical of the basics of the of psychoanalysis itself (Holt, Perkin, Renik),  The notions of the plurality of psychoanalysis and the schools happened at that same time when psychoanalysis was booming everywhere else. The intellectual revolution of those decades was constructive to psychoanalysis when and where it was open to others, and destructive when it was isolated in specialized Institutes.  

What I want to underline is that learning and training in institutes of psychoanalysis, whatever their affiliation, is susceptible to provide distorted, if not wrong understanding of psychoanalysis. The graduates (accredited and certified as psychoanalysts) learn a psychoanalysis that has no link to anything else but psychoanalysis. The normal process of the development and evolution of any body of knowledge is to widen and spread its boundaries of exploration and insights. This expansion would inevitably touch the widened and the spreads of neighbouring bodies of knowledge. This process is not passible in the case of the current system of training in IPA institutes. To be fair, I do not know anything in that system that prohibit such expansions, but the structure of the system makes it difficult. The death of psychoanalysis is happening because its system of learning and training does not have provisions for its revitalisation by the input from the other humanities. The solution is to move learning and training in psychoanalysis to where the contact with other sources of knowledge is available and comes naturally. We should give training and learning of psychoanalysis to academia if we are keen to keep it alive. Although this idea is not objected to in Europe much, but what is noticeable is not agreeing to making training and learning of psychoanalysis more than just degrees in the field of psychotherapy (offering Ph.D. in what is in fact psychotherapy).