293 © 2003 The Analytic Press, Inc.

Introduction

Malcolm Owen Slavin, Ph.D.

Malcolm Owen Slavin, Ph.D. is a founder, former President, Faculty, and Super-

vising Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP). He is a Con-tributing Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and coauthored, with Daniel Kriegman,The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology and theTherapeutic Process.

1 The actual questions can be found at the beginning of the training symposium.

Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 13(3):293–299, 2003SYMPOSIUM ON TRAINING AND EDUCATION IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

S YOU READ THIS SYMPOSIUM ON PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING AND

Supervision I think you will find yourself looking through anAunusual window at the current landscape of our field. Askedby the editors of Dialogues to respond to a set of six (and two follow-up) questions about how training has been influenced by variouscontemporary trends and shifts in the American analytic world, adiverse group of analytic educators responded from their particularinstitutional perches.1 What our panelists reveal, of course, goes wellbeyond their wide and interesting range of approaches to creatingeffective structures for educating candidates. Their differing views ofthe challenge of training in a diverse, changing analytic world—indeedin their attitudes toward and interpretation of those changes as definedby Dialogues—reveal the wide range of current sensibilities about justwhat constitutes an “analytic identity,” as well as fascinating hints ofthe different institutional cultures dotting the American analyticlandscape.

Following this excursion through multiple institutional environ-ments, the other part of this issue contains an experience of somethingcloser to live examples, as it were, of these cultural analytic differencesand how they might converge on candidates presenting their work ina contemporary, comparative setting. Three analysts of markedlydifferent persuasions give us samples of how they, as supervisors, wouldtypically respond to two “supervisees” who present their work to their“supervisors,” and to us, through substantial case reports.

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As a kind of reader’s guide to the rich variety of perspectives ontraining and supervision in this issue, I would like to suggest an overallway of listening to multiple levels of what the education panelists aretelling us about their different conceptions of training and stances insupervision. To maintain perspective, let us remember that nonanalyticobservers (including most therapists) usually assume (if they thinkabout it at all) that analytic training is a basically standardized processof coursework, case supervision, and personal analysis. Yet, it will bequickly apparent to Dialogues readers that, in the environment of eachpanelist’s institute, we hear reflected the larger philosophical andclinical traditions that powerfully inform virtually every aspect oftraining.

These various traditions create different ways of grappling with commoncontemporary challenges—different strategies of accommodation that,from within the field, can sometimes loom large and radical. From theclassical commitments of Otto Kernberg’s essentially InternationalPsychoanalytic Association viewpoint to the contemporary relationalexperiments at Margaret Crasnopol’s relatively new program in Seattle(each perhaps representing the poles of the spectrum encompassing thefive institutes), the panelists’ views suggest that certain core conceptionsof what fundamentally constitutes psychoanalysis (and what it means tobe an analyst) pervade the shape and substance of what otherwise mightappear to be remarkably convergent curricula, attitudes toward genderand sexual orientation, as well as other facets of training.

A Spectrum of Institutional Orientations

Reading the descriptions of each institute’s program (in response tothe initial and then follow-up questions posed by Dialogues), we cansketch a basic map of the way course content and orientation seem toencompass a spectrum that ranges from:

Kernberg’s enduring commitment to a kind of internationalistclassical (including ego-psychological and Kleinian) definition ofanalysis. His definition serves as a rigorous, uniform, theoretical filterthrough which he seems able to translate most new contemporaryAmerican analytic perspectives into versions of perennial issues thatare then interpreted in traditional terms; to

Ellen Rees’s attempts at Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute to createa highly intricate, systematic analytic curriculum presented in a spirit

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that appears to represent an assiduous pedagogical neutrality regardingdifferent analytic models set loose in a kind of free-market competitionfor the ultimate illumination of analytic truth; to

Emanual Berman’s depiction of what we might call a liberated classicalinstitute—the Israel Psychoanalytic—in which an open, modularcurriculum seems to have begun to take shape in response to substant-ial internal conflict and ongoing debate about the overarchingquestions of authority and the role of idealization (of analysis, traininganalysts, and training institutes); to

Mary Beth Cresci’s view of the Postgraduate Center in New York ashaving evolved away from a Freudian orientation to what sounds likea frankly constructivist sensibility about the analytic process. She seesthis process as, nevertheless,“all-inclusive” in its current embrace ofmultiple (including traditional) analytic perspectives and as uniqueamong the institutes in the striking ethnic diversity of its candidates;to, finally,

Margaret Crasnopol’s depiction of the core training philosophyembedded in the founding of the Northwest Center for Psychoanalysisin Seattle. Her approach attempts to be broadly comparative in itscurriculum while strongly privileging some of the central currents andvalues of contemporary American relational psychoanalysis. Theextreme particularity of each analytic relationship is emphasized verystrongly with its corollaries in a personally tailored, highly individualorientation to each candidate’s training experience.

Listening for Other Implicit Differences in Orientation

Within the differing philosophical and institutional identities thatdefine the individual points on this spectrum, a host of otherdifferences in training sensibilities and ways of tackling the Dialoguesquestions will no doubt impress readers attuned to all the richvariations of different training environments. Many may find it usefulto look at the implicit aspects of where the panelists are coming fromand how these give a distinctive cast to their whole approach totraining and to the potential tensions between their positions.

Helen Rees, for instance, seems to have little trouble accepting thehigh level of uncertainty and relativity surrounding many fundamentalanalytic issues. Yet she also seems to hold a firm conviction that newempirical data and open debate will bring sufficient clarity to resolve

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these issues in some ultimately objective way. We might ask whetherthis view subtly carries with it assumptions that diminish the role oftheory and the theorist (as fundamental in constructing analyticproblems). Is there an expectation that we can educate candidates inways that will allow the “data” (and the insights of related disciplines)ultimately to resolve our differences?

Studying psychoanalysis comparatively in this kind of open,scientifically oriented way may have a great deal to recommend it asan ideal; yet Rees’s thorough, systemic training approach, character-izing many major analytic differences as rooted in our current ignoranceof ultimately knowable, universal principles, may also represent anideological stance that pervades the whole training experience. I amreminded of a local institute—one that, to be fair, is far less committedto debate and inquiry than Columbia is—that portrays itself to pro-spective candidates as uncommitted to any particular analyticperspective. Indeed it puts itself forth as open to all of them claimingto privilege what it deems to be a true clinical focus that, somehow,transcends contemporary concerns with the clash of paradigms thatcharacterizes many current analytic debates.

What is implicit in Emanuel Berman’s depiction of the Israeliexperience may take us to a very different perch in regard to therelationship of the training experience to the candidate’s increasingaccess to analytic truth. While Berman, like Rees, sees the currentlyunpredictable future of analysis as the grounds for breadth in thetraining experience, we sense that Berman’s emphasis (reflectingperhaps a heightened Israeli attunement to uncertainty) is on thecreation of a wide-ranging flexibility in the analyst. This flexibilityrather than any expectation of cumulative progress toward analytictruth, is seen as the basis of a capacity to adapt individually to anecessarily changing, ambiguous future analytic world.

A Question Not Posed

Several of the panelists make interesting references to changes in thecandidates’experience of their “training analyses.” For instance, MaryBeth Cresci comments on the increased questioning that currentcandidates bring to their own analytic experience; and Kernberg—while faithful to the dichotomy of “the transferential versus the real,”

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which many of us link closely to the overidealization of all analyticauthority——is nevertheless extremely sensitive to the atmosphereof intimidation and persecution in institute cultures.

Yet none of the questions posed by Dialogues, nor any of theparticipants’ responses directly address the tensions and, as many seeit, the fundamental contradictions in the nature of the training analystsystem: the belief that an institutionally loyal, selected group of analystsshould serve as the personal analysts for all candidates. EmmanuelBerman notes a shift in Israel away from the traditionally tiny groupof overidealized training/supervising analysts who are seen as a“superior breed.” Yet the potentially huge implications of a candidate’sexquisitely personally vulnerable relationship with someonesimultaneously vested with ultimate institutional authority—as wellas the potential effects of the training analyst system in closing andperpetuating the institute’s own belief structure and culture—is notexplicitly raised. All the panelists’ institutes seem to retain some formof this ubiquitous training tradition. It might be useful to read theparticipants’ portrayals of their training philosophies with an eyetoward the implications of having one’s choice of personal analyst,and entire supervisory experience, limited to a “training and super-vising analyst” who, in even the most open systems, is among a groupof individuals closely identified with the authority of one’s owninstitute?2

Imagine Having Three Supervisors

It might at first seem as though the other part of this issue—featuringthree masterful supervisors sharing their takes on two detailed casepresentations—is only indirectly connected to the symposium ontraining. Yet I think you will find that there is actually an extraordinary

2 Very few institutes leave candidates free to choose their personal analyst from

the full range of analysts in their community—even allowing them to choose analystswho are members of (and often loyal to) competing institutes. I believe such freechoice is the long-existing policy established at the New York University PostdoctoralProgram in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis by Bernard Kalinkowitz, Ph.D. It hasbeen one of the basic features of training at the Massachusetts Institute forPsychoanalysis (MIP), founded by a group of us in 1987.

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continuity between the two parts. Imagine yourself in the shoes ofeach these candidates whose work is the object of commentary bythree supervisors, and you will have a tangible sense of the incrediblearray of contrasting perspectives with which a candidate contends ina contemporary, comparative training program—as many of theinstitutions in this symposium at least strive to be.

Striking differences of analytic theoretical orientation in thesupervisors virtually jump off the page: Martin Bergmann’s humaneapplication of classical theory; Frank Lachmann’s contemporary self-psychological sensibility; and Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea’s systematicrelational perspective on both treatment and the process of supervision.

Do we imagine the candidates’ experience of such multiplicity asoverwhelming, or as richly expanding and freeing? As deepening one’sunderstanding, or as confusing and intensifying the already nearlyimpossible challenges of beginning to define what analysis is about?Alternatively, can we imagine ourselves into the experience of acandidate training at a more traditional institute—an institute that,like most nowadays, professes an openness to the diversity in con-temporary analysis. Yet at this institute only one of these radicallycontrasting supervisory perspectives strongly predominates as “trulyanalytic” among that select cadre of teachers/supervisors of which,indeed, her own “training analyst” is an integral part?

Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea pulls us back from our tendency to focuson the analytic content of the supervision to attend to the basicattitude—presumably also her own—of the supervisor toward thesupervisor’s authority. This focus allows us to examine collaborativelythe process by which supervisory authority arises and, ongoing, ismutually shaped with the candidate. Can we imagine Bergmann andLachmann attempting to engage in such a process dialogue? Thatquestion comes to mind not in relation to whether they, as individuals,would be willing and able to do so, but in relation to the magnitude ofFrawley-O’Dea’s challenge to the supervisory couple: risking conflictand having the words and gumption to negotiate with a powerfulsupervisory figure who is, himself—however much he valuesdialogue—likely to be daunted by trying to be open to hearing whatin the supervisee’s case does not readily fit his expectations. How muchcan we envision such a potential for surprise and contradiction—forwhat is unformulated in (or formulated out of) our theories—enteringthe supervisor’s awareness?

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You may be struck, as I was, by Emmanuel Berman’s suggestion that,in our work, the couch may free us to be “surprised by unexpecteddevelopments.” Analytic training programs and their faculties are, ofcourse, as much in need of being “surprised by unexpected develop-ments” as any other human arrangement that, at the same time, muststrive for, and provide, secure, predictable structure. I see myself asremaining (since the founding of the Massachusetts Institute forPsychoanalysis 15 years ago) strongly committed to a consistentlycomparative-critical approach to teaching and to a wariness aboutthe historical misuse of analytic and institutional rules and regulationsand definitions. One of the most vexing struggles we faced was thedeep anxiety that a flexible, comparative structure did seem to raisein our first generation of candidates. In response, a quest for moretraditional analytic rules was created that many of us founders cameto recognize only after considerable struggle. For several years I thinkI went around mumbling to myself that “an institute, like life, issomething that happens while you’re making other plans.” Negotiatingpathways through those uncharted years was one of the most personallyvaluable endeavors I’ve engaged in. I hope our training symposiumand demonstration of multiple supervisory encounters somehowincludes moments that violate your expectations enough to create abit of this kind of rewarding surprise.

112 Lakeview AvenueCambridge, MA 02138Malslavin@aol.com