Training analyst

A training analysis is a psychoanalysis undergone by a candidate (perhaps a physician with specialty in psychiatry or a psychologist) as a part of her/his training to be a psychoanalyst; the (senior) psychoanalyst who performs such an analysis is called a training analyst.

For most of the psychoanalytical societies, a training analysis is different both from a psychoanalysis performed for the "therapeutic treatment of a patient" and from psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

The pioneers of psychoanalysis did not have training analyses - of the inner circle around Freud, Ernest Jones said jokingly that the first training analysis was a series of walks taken by Max Eitingon with Freud around the streets of Vienna!

Freud himself credited the Zurich school around Jung with first raising the question of an analysis for budding psychoanalysts, but it was only after World War I that the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute led the way in mandating a training analysis of a year at least: half a century later, it would not be unusual to spend fifteen years in (a double) training analysis.

The principle of an obligatory training analysis was formalized by the IPA in 1922, a strong lead being given in this by Sándor Ferenczi.

Many of the controversies that would subsequently plague psychoanalysis came to centre on the question of the training analysis.

The controversial discussions within British psychoanalysis swiftly came to focus on the question of analytic training. They were only resolved by setting up separate training programmes within the same psychoanalytic society.

Lacan always maintained that "the aim of my teaching has been and is still the training of analysts"; and it was on this point that the controversies around him repeatedly focused. Early criticism for shortening the length of training analyses, and exploiting the transference to build up a personal following, blossomed in the demand by the IPA that his teaching "is to be regarded as null and void as far as any qualification to the title of psycho-analyst is concerned".

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