The Marketplace, Psychology, Psychoanalysis and the Issue of Psychoanalytic Training in the 1990s

1985 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irving Raifman
1992 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 1185-1210 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Morris

Psychoanalytic education in the United States faces multiple challenges as we enter the last decade of this century. (1) Changing interest and career path patterns for psychiatrists have resulted in fewer medical applications for psychoanalytic training. (2) Increased opportunities for full psychoanalytic training of nonphysicians have resulted in increased applications from highly skilled clinicians who often have more clinical experience than their medical colleagues. (3) Increased enrollment of women candidates has required rethinking of progression requirements, in light of their combined careers as professionals and mothers. (4) Independent institutes not accredited by the American Psychoanalytic Association compete for applicants while maintaining training standards that require less time and immersion in psychoanalytic theory and practice. (5) Economic factors increasingly influence the desirability of prolonged psychoanalytic training and the availability of suitable analysands for control analyses. (6) Evolution of theory and practice and the emergence of “new schools” of psychoanalytic thought have rendered the previous psychoanalytic landscape dominated by drive theory and ego psychology more multifaceted and less uniform. The American Psychoanalytic Association and its institutes attempt to understand these changing patterns and take them into consideration in the design and implementation of psychoanalytic training programs. Only one aspect of this complex situation will be described in this work, the current state of psychoanalytic training in the 28 institutes accredited by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Although the data available at this time leave unanswered many important questions about the philosophies that organize the content and emphases of the curriculum in different institutes, much has been learned about the overall structure of psychoanalytic training programs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-246
Author(s):  
Janine Wanlass

The author traces the development of a collaborative psychoanalytic training programme for couple and family therapists in China, launched through the shared efforts of Drs David Scharff, Jill Savege Scharff, Janine Wanlass, Fang Xin and Gao Jun, enrolling more than 400 students over the past twelve years. The stressors of economic change, greater interaction with the West, legacies left by the Cultural Revolution, challenges associated with the one-child policy, and escalating divorce rates created a need for therapists to intervene with Chinese couples and families exhibiting distress (Scharff, 2020, 2021). A training programme was conceived, including didactic teaching from an object relations perspective, a live clinical demonstration of psychotherapy with a couple or family, and small process groups led by Chinese therapists to help trainees integrate affective, cognitive, and behavioural learning components. The author contends that the success of this programme was largely dependent on a collaboration of cultures and personnel, as American teachers learned about psychoanalytic thinking from a Chinese cultural lens and Chinese administrators, faculty, and students discovered effective ways to address the mental health struggles of Chinese couples and families.


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