The latent in the institutional dimension of transmission

Abstract

What do we mean by transmission? Is it a matter of passing on, from generation to generation, the knowledge theoretically acquired through the many readings we have done in the course of our development as analysts, or is it more a matter of experience?
In this paper the authors ask themselves these and other questions and try to account for the weight that the institutional dimension has in the difficult task of psychoanalytic transmission, while examining its incidence in the different areas of the tripod during training: seminars, supervised analysis and even personal analysis. They also review some of the problems that, in their opinion, hinder the task of transmission in the internal functioning of a psychoanalytic association, drawing attention to the risk of falling into a kind of «institutional infantile neurosis», while at the same time rescuing the notion of the transference prism which accounts for the multiple cross-transfers in psychoanalytic organisations; they also emphasise the double character of the institutional traversal as instituted and instituting, which both contains and allows us to produce, as well as hindering our listening, even in an unconscious way, highlighting the importance of the creative in the formative context.