Ending and unending psychoanalytic training: transmission, training and lack

Abstract

Why are the splits in psychoanalytic societies so frequently associated with the question of the training of psychoanalysts, irrespective of the training model used, whether it is dominated by a freedom that appeals to the specific requirements of each person or by a programme marked by a collective demand for teaching? The training of psychoanalysts is a locus of transference occupied by intense forces that have consequences for psychoanalytic institutions. The transmission of psychoanalysis combines an accomplishment of the mind and an infinite acculturation that includes training proper.

Personal analysis, the historical reminiscences of childhood learning, individual sensitivity to the unconscious, the capacity
to produce unconscious formations and to interpret them, identification with the analytic functioning of other analysts acting
as supports for the transference of authority, inter-analytic confrontations,the teaching of mental functioning and its working
modalities, repeated frequentations with clinical reality, openness to other disciplines, the masochistic experience of the gravity of life embodied in maturity, and personal as well intimate and erotogenic life are all involved.
This list reminds us that unconscious tendencies exist that tend to reduce our psychic capacities and our identity as analysts. They must be taken into account in training in order to make them an object of knowledge and to appeal to the psychic demand to make use of them for the benefit of mental activity. A psychoanalytic ethic founded on masochistic functioning is thus transmitted through training. No one can become an analyst and remain one alone. But no one becomes an analyst by virtue of the institution alone. Oscillations between the individual superego and the cultural superego, between session regressions and those of other scenes outside the session ground the possibility of becoming and rebecoming an analyst intermittently.