Thoughts on the Group Self of psychoanalysis…
The International Psychoanalytic website is pleased to present an important op ed piece by Marian Tolpin. This eminent analyst from Chicago explains clearly, articulately, and persuasively why the training analyst title should be retired. The Executive Board of the International Psychoanalytic Association would not permit its publication. The International Psychoanalytic Blog stands for freedom of expression and welcomes comments on this important and timely article.
Jane S. Hall
Op Ed Editor
Thoughts on the Group Self of psychoanalysis,
in light of the controversy over Training Analysis status
Marian Tolpin, M.D.
There is currently a great deal of debate taking place in psychoanalytic training centers, around the world and here in the United States, concerning whether there should be a separate category of graduate psychoanalysts designated as specially qualified to analyze future psychoanalysts. Among those who do believe that there needs to be such a category, further debate has raged on what that special qualification might entail and on the particulars of how (when, by whom) it should be established and evaluated.
In what follows below I reflect on my own experiences in regard to this category and on the lengthy history of the Training Analysis question as a disruptive force in institutional psychoanalysis. As I consider why this fractious issue, which has caused so much dissension in our profession, remains perpetually unresolved, I conclude that the Training Analysis serves a Group Self cohesive function. As such, it joins a list of other myths that have served that function in the past; myths that were clung to but ultimately had to be relinquished in the face of contradictory evidence.
1. The myth of the “special” analyst:
First, in the interest of full disclosure, let me state that I have been a training and supervising analyst since 1975, which means that I underwent an analysis with an analyst who had been designated as “special’ and, after further evaluation, was designated as equally fit to treat and train others who wished to ascend to my position. I have enjoyed my status as a training analyst. It has not made me a better analyst, but it is better to be a “have” than a “have not”, and it has enhanced my career.
I see the training analyst controversy as a symptom of the vulnerability of the Group Self of psychoanalysis. When that Group Self is threatened and vulnerable from, for example, charges that psychoanalysis is an “inexact science” or from patients who do not get better, there is a propensity to rally around a special analyst (Freud) or a self-annointed institutional group of specially designated analysts (the Boardd of Professional Standards [BOPS], even in the face of contradictory evidence.
The current insistence that BOPS knows what is ‘right’ in terms of training and analysis continues Freud’s tradition of always tenaciously insisting that he was right (until he was ready to change his theory). For example, Freud was ”right” about his seduction hypothesis, until forced to acknowledge he was wrong. Or he was “right” that Dora (1905) had a vengeful father transference to him, abruptly ending her treatment to revenge herself against him (as she wished to revenge herself against her father) and wanting to continue treatment with him in order to exact even more revenge. Thus, he was “right” to refuse her further treatment. Likewise, Freud insisted he was “right” about the Wolfman’s passive anality or the ubiquitous female castration complex as constituting absolute psychic “bedrock”, and about the “psychic inertia” responsible for interminable analyses (1937).
Our current example of ‘special-analyst-who-knows’ is BOPS who ”knows best” and is “right” to insist that it is the ultimate arbiter of psychoanalytic standards, and that only it is preeminently qualified to uphold the standards that it sets. That is, BOPS maintains that graduates of its own-approved institutes require its committee’s oversight and imprimatur; graduation is simply not sufficient qualification for either certification or training analyst status, for which certification has been designated (by BOPS) as the “right” first step.
This method of control over all aspects of training, including controlling the flow of future analysts designated as equally special, has a long history in our field and touches on my own personal history, as well. Some forty years ago, the Piers’ report, commissioned by then-president of the American Psychoanalytic Association Samuel Ritvo, concluded that certification and training analyst appointment seriously weakened the field. The report was critical of one group’s—BOPS—arrogating to itself the functions of overseeing both institutes and appointments in accord with what they think is analysis. At the time of my training, I also opposed and questioned this position. After I graduated, Leo Loomie, then-BOPS chair, threatened to expose the Chicago Institute if I, and a group of my peers, persisted in questioning the necessity for post-graduation certification by BOPS. Loomie wrote that he would reveal that Chicago Institute’s then-Director Gerhart Piers and then-Dean Joan Fleming had “admitted in writing to him” that they had allowed some “compassionate graduations”. However, since the 1940s, the decreasing number of new analysts, with one-third of our membership past seventy (myself included), vindicates the predictions of the Piers report: BOPS oversight was, and would continue to be, an important contributing factor in weakening American psychoanalysis.
2. Two examples of past psychoanalytic Group Self myths:
There are other myths that have been used by psychoanalysts to maintain a cohesive Group Self. Here I will mention only two from the past: The “Poor Breuer” myth and the “Eager Band of Followers” myth. The Poor Breuer myth began with Freud (1914) and was further elaborated by Ernest Jones (1953) in his account of Josef Breuer’s weakness, panic and flight from his patient Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim). Freud’s original account of Breuer’s treatment of Anna O. served his own purpose to rationalize and buttress his insistence that sexuality is the cause of neurosis. The story was that Breuer showed “distaste” for sexuality and (later) “repudiated” Freud’s view of the sexual etiology of neurosis. He claimed that an “untoward event” concerning his patient’s transference in “its crudely sexual form” led Breuer to “break off all further investigation”.
This retrospective “reconstruction” by Freud of what happened was uncritically accepted by his followers as the truth. It was then further elaborated, taking on mythic proportions, in Jones’ account, as follows. In a panic, Breuer fled from Anna O.’s “hysterical” labor, and rushed to Venice on a second honeymoon to appease his wife who was jealous of his patient. There, he impregnated her with a baby girl who would much later commit suicide in New York. However, the truth is that there was neither a flight, a Venetian honeymoon, nor a child conceived there; nor was there a suicide in New York. Hirschmuller’s biography (The Life and Work of Josef Breuer, 1989) provides indisputable documentation in the form of Breuer’s correspondence showing that he attempted to hospitalize Bertha Pappenheim after he unknowingly caused her morphine addiction; that, as was his custom, he vacationed near Vienna; that his daughter was born during Anna O’s treatment; and that she died in Vienna after taking poison to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. Yet, the myth of Poor Breuer, contrasting his panic and flight when faced with the “untoward event” of his patient’s “crude sexuality” with Freud’s steadfast insistence on the etiological bedrock of sexuality, took many generations to loosen its grip on Freud’s “Eager Band of Followers”.
In 1931 Freud was certain that his theory of girls’ “rock bottom” penis envy and castration complex was right. He lauded his “eager band of followers…[who] closed ranks” to demonstrate their agreement. When all of his followers did not join his “eager band” Freud resorted to his authority and disparaged the dissenters. Karen Horney and Melanie Klein, for example, must be “wrong”, Their objections would have required him to change his mind and revise his entire timetable of normal development and the indisputable position of the Oedipus complex as the chief motivating force for neurosis. So Freud deemed that their objections must arise from “feminist views”. Similarly, it must be Fenichel’s and Jones’ “feminist views” that led them to dispute Freud’s theory of the nuclear female castration complex.
The legacy of Freud’s insistence that he must be “right” persists as “eager bands of followers” still “close ranks” around their favorite theorist and his/her claim that one theory alone is the “pure gold” of analysis, that others’ are mere “alloys.” The same recourse to authority and disparagement is used to dispel valid disagreements, to dismiss controversial ideas or contradictory clinical evidence, and to exclude dissenters from the special group. When I was in training Ralph Greenson (1967) designated Melanie Klein’s theory as a “deviant” school, and David Rapapport (unpublished lectures in the 1960s) referred to Klein’s “id mythology”. Recently, Hanna Segal declared that British Independent analysts did not do “real” analysis. And so, the tradition–to know what is right and to disparage those who question or disagree—continues as the myth of upholding standards.
3. The myth of upholding standards—continued weakening of psychoanalysis:
In his study (2000), Unfree Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes, Douglas Kirsner squarely blames the training analyst institution for the continuing weakening of our field. (He does not neglect sociological factors promoting a decrease in analytic patients and in analysts’ prestige.) Kirsner’s intensive study of four American Psychoanalytic Association institutes is summed us as follows:
Since there is scant agreement [among analysts] about anything in detail
[theory], how can analytic ‘standards’ be other than a myth? Outside of
anointment what can be the meaning of ‘qualification’ in psychoanalysis? Where qualification is not based on an agreed body of knowledge, disintegration products abound, leaving the way open for the role of power plays, anointment, cultism, personality. There is here a folie a deux. Mystification serves the…. emotional needs of everyone in the system…. for a putative certainty that can establish a qualification as real… mystification…inspires some collusion on the part of candidates… the way this atmosphere of anointment has persisted has been through the training analysis and the appointment of those who have the right to train. These issues have always been at the heart of analytic disputes (2000, pp. 238-9).
Kirsner contributes a cogent and alarming view of psychoanalytic culture from his ‘outsider’s’ perspective. From my ‘insider’s’ perspective I have attempted to make the same case: it is time to end the training analyst institution. If not now, when? If not us, who?
Marian Tolpin, M.D.
Training and Supervising Analyst
Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis
122 South Michigan Avenue, 14th floor
Chicago, Illinois 60603, U.S.A.
Explore posts in the same categories: Controversial, Editorials, Future of PsychEd
April 27th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Thanks for the articulate critique, Marian. Given that all societies of the IPA require designated TA’s, and that abolishing this has little or no likelihood of ever occurring, what would YOU do to fix the problems you have identified?
Ralph
April 28th, 2008 at 6:07 am
Miriam,
All of us owe you a vote of thanks for your willingness to speak out so
directly on the sensitive issue of the current and future status of the
“Training Analyst System.”
Although there is no clear consensus in the profession as to the issue
of whether any “value” is added to psychoanalytic education by the TA
system, I do think there is a growing recognition that the TA system
has had some harmful effects on the profession as a whole — a profession
which includes, but at the same time is much more than, an educational
enterprise.
The initially simple concept that some specific psychoanalysts should be
assigned the task of analyzing trainees has taken on a life of its own
leading to the creation of an unjustified, and unjustifiable, hierarchy
within the profession. This has brought down on all of us the predictable
tensions and problems which exist in any organization in which life-long
anointments and perceived unique privileges are bestowed on a sub-set of
the membership.
For example, there is nothing in the current selection process for TA’s in
APsaA which selects for those with particular leadership skills, yet the
startling fact is that there have only been TWO individuals in the entire
sixty year history of APsaA who have been elected as Officers of the
Association and have not been TAs!
In fact, the very idea of having been “appointed” as a TA now seems to
carry with it the aura of some kind of “rank” which leads individual
psychoanalysts to describe themselves as a “Training and Supervising
Analyst” in meeting programs, etc., even when such meetings have nothing
in particular to do with the analysis or supervision of trainees. Long
forgotten is the fact that Hans Sachs was appointed as the first TA (in
Berlin) simply because analysis of trainees was not considered to be
medical treatment and Sachs, a non-physician, could not conduct
therapeutic analyses in Berlin!
The evidence is that the tide of opinion within the profession has been
starting to turn on the issue of the value of maintaining the “TA system”
as we currently know it. That change is evidenced not only by the wide
popularity of Jurgen Reeder’s 2004 book on this subject Hate and Love in Psychoanalytical
Institutions: The Dilemma of a Profession but also in the fact that
the current incoming President of APsaA –a TA herself, of course –
specifically ran for the office on a “platform” that contained as one of
its major elements the elimination of the TA system and it’s replacement
by a “personal analyst system” for training purposes.
Paul
April 28th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Thank You Marion for a straightforward and elegant statement that may indeed help to save our field. I do not despair of our rationality in the service of self preservation and wish to protect our capacity to help others to achieve the satisfaction of knowing understanding and forgiving oneself. I expect that our new president who ran on the promise to get rid of the pernicious training analyst system will lead us in that change. It is what so many of us voted for when we voted for her.
Arlene Kramer Richards
April 28th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Every educational institution has some way of differentiating, and marking seniority plus excellence
in the field. In the academic world, after your basic higher level masters degree, you do a doctorate,
which qualifies you work within the field, but your seniority as an academic is judged by further
research output plus years of teaching. Similarly, in psychoanalysis. Hence the granting of training
analyst status.
Heres a surmise about why such a straightforward issue is creating so much dissension. I suspect,
this has something to do with the institution of psychoanalysis, of its training methods, and
particularly with its development in the North American context, ie by restricting it to those who had
medical degrees with little exposure to the pedagogical methods of the academy. Marion Tolpin’s
paper reflects the experience of a medical practitioner trained in psychoanalysis within North
America. She speaks to the authoritarianism inherent in the closed institutes that evolved in North
America where training in analysis was restricted to doctors, outside of the ambit of the kind of open
discussion and critical kind of education you generally receive in a university setting when you’re
doing an advanced degree. And the training itself took place in closed environments which assumed
the ambience of secretive masonic lodges.
Ostensibly, to preserve itself in the face of such antipathy, the teaching and dissemination of analysis
originally took place in the cloistered and ivory towered precincts of what are more or less closed
training institutes. There may have been good reason why in its early day, the discipline decided to
insulate itself in this way. The idea of having psychoanalytic institutes outside the academy was a
deliberate strategy devised to protect the discipline - from constant onslaught and assault from the
outside and the inside world and allow it to evolve without such pressure. In those beginning year,
when the group of early psychoanalysts was quite small, several gifted members of the circle around
Freud, like Rank, Adler and Jung proposed alternative conceptions which he feared would take the
nascent discipline in a direction at variance from the one he envisioned for it. A further reason why
this feature continues to do this day, is that analysts are aware that their paradigms of research (the
clinical dyad) for instance, whose efficacy they are convinced about, from long years of working, are
very different from those which prevail in the academy. By being (overly) protective about this, they
have been insulated from other forms of enquiry, which have also not had exposure tothe research
methods and paradigms of analyis.
Systematic knowledge derived from experimental and clinical work over the last century has
provided psychoanalysts with important information which has led to knowledge of how psychic
discord resulting from earlier developmental phases can be worked on, worked through and
alleviated. However, because the training and practice of this discipline has taken place largely
outside the academy the results of this research are not widely known in the larger intellectual world.
In any case, most disciplines in the academy are bifurcated into specialized domains which remain
disjunct and unknown to each other. This has been exacerbated in the case of psychoanalysis by its
own institutional trajectory resulting in the fact that those in the academy know even less about it
than other fields of knowledge - of its rich and complex development both theoretically and
clinically, about the many competing corpus of theories which comprise it, or of the rich research
traditions spawned by it. Similarly, psychoanalytic education has also suffered from being cut off
and insulated from academic forms of enquiry.
I come to psychoanalysis from the discipline of philosophy after spending several years teaching and
doing research in an academic setting. Many psychoanalysts such as myself are persuaded that it
has not served the discipline well to be so closed off from other forms of critical enquiry. At the
same time, I believe that the methods and research paradigms of psychoanalysis need to be
safeguarded, preserved and built upon. Although I now practice and work in India, I have trained at
an institute which values and maintains a focus on critical enquiry and research, attempts to build
bridges with academic institutions and has attempted to build structures of inclusive democratic
functioning (IPTAR, New York).
I believe that the problems Marion Tolpin raises has to do with the closed, uncritical forms of
functioning in many psychoanalytic institutes and not with the status pertaining to a specific position
in the training hierachy such as training analyst.
April 29th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Comment from Henry J. Friedman
My admiration for Marian Tolpin has deep roots extending back to the first Self Psychology Annual meeting way back in the 70’s when she befriended me and introduced me to Heinz Kohut. Over the years we would meet at the Annual Self Psychology meeting where we both served on the Council for that organization. Her reflections on the TA system are, typically of Marian, sharp and accurate. She focuses upon the obvious way in which the TA system has contributed to the decline in candidates for training in our Institutes, correctly indicating that there have been other factors as well. Basically, however, the rigidity that the TA system and BOPS have imposed on our Institutes has resulted in many potential candidates avoiding training in psychoanalysis or going to non APsaA Institutes. Marian correctly indicates that the choice on her part to become a TA had to do with adaptation; better to get the benefits of being one than sit on the sidelines and watch. She has done a great deal from the vantage point of a TA even braving the chilling reception of selfpsychology at the winter meetings in New York.
I would only attempt to add to Marian’s excellent critique of the TA system by adding my observation that it is intellectual freedom and a sense of inquiry that have suffered because of the TA system. The ability to think for oneself is perhaps the most important element in being an effective psychoanalyst with patients. Our TA system eliminates competition of the open variety for candidates in analysis. By restricting those who analyze candidates to a selected few we are assured that the cadre of TAs are “approved” as to personality, theory and technique. Those who question the so called basic assumptions or who have personalities that don’t flatter those in power are excluded from seeing candidates. The homogeneous nature of the TA group because of segregation assures that our candidates are in analysis with those who don’t shake the foundations, innovate and change how we think about analysis.
I believe that a TA like Marian Tolpin understands the negatives of the TA system because she had to live through the birth of self psychology and endure the disapproval of the establishment of these new ideas, this new perspective on psychoanalysis. The ability to call for the end of the TA system depends upon a sense of its unfairness to talented individuals who think independently and innovatively. I hope that many more will join with Marian in supporting this very important change that will permit for more competition between analysts with a resultant freeing up of how our graduates practice psychoanalysis with real patients.
Henry J. Friedman
April 29th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Comment from Emanuel Berman:
Emanuel Berman*
Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education
Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2004
Psychoanalytic Training and the Utopian New Person Fantasy
It is a paradox of Freudian psychoanalysis that, whilst consistently struggling against illusion, it somehow activates it.
—Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel and Bela Grunberger, Freud or Reich?
—————————–
OUR “SPECIAL KIND OF SUPEREGO” AND COMMON IDEALIZATIONS
Is the issue of a “New Person fantasy” relevant to psychoanalysis? I believe it may offer us a useful context for the critical examination of some pitfalls in analytic training (Berman, 2000c). These pitfalls have been first highlighted by Balint (1948), who observes that candidates are influenced by an atmosphere that results in “submissiveness to dogmatic and authoritarian treatment without much protest.” The system, Balint says, contrary to its conscious aim of developing a strong critical ego, necessarily leads to “a weakening of these ego functions and to the formation and strengthening of a special kind of super-ego.” (p. 167).
I suggest that this “special kind of super-ego” is related to our tendency to envision the “real analyst” as a purified New Person and that such an expectation (conscious or unconscious) may contribute—through a complex interaction of intrapsychic forces and group dynamics—to the emergence of oppressive, hypercritical elements in the atmosphere of some psychoanalytic institutes and clinical training programs.
Several idealizations that appear at times in psychoanalytic thinking may potentially form a “utopian state of mind” regarding psychoanalysis.
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The Training Analyst as a Superior Analyst
Although many authors agree nowadays with Ferenczi and Rank (1924) that “the correct didactic analysis is one that does not in the least differ from the curative treatment” (p. 60), the image of the training analyst as a superior analyst is still prominent in the literature, and much has been written about the outstanding qualities of training analysts. Such descriptions are very appealing, but I have some doubts whether they fit the way any of us are described in informal conversations among colleagues or trainees.
Moreover, while the goal is to make sure that candidates benefit from high-quality analysis and supervision, it appears that the appointment of training analysts is very often influenced by transferences, political alliances, charisma, visibility, personal popularity, rumors, and other factors not necessarily related to quality per se. “Discretion, secrecy and uncertainty about what is required to become a training analyst, how these decisions are made, where and by whom” are listed by Kernberg (1996, p. 1039) as widespread phenomena that sabotage the creativity of faculty members, and subsequently of candidates.
The belief that training analysts can be chosen as the best according to objective standards again appears to disregard intersubjective emotional reality. This is one of my few disagreements with Kernberg (2000). Experience shows that views about most analysts vary, and even senior colleagues may be admired by some and criticized by others. Variations in theoretical approach and in preferences for different analytic styles appear to influence such gaps, in addition to purely personal likes and dislikes, which are easily rationalized and intellectualized.
In this respect, “objectively choosing the best analysts as training analysts” may be equivalent to “objectively choosing the best applicants to be admitted as candidates”; both beliefs convey disregard to the subjective and intersubjective nature of all interpersonal perceptions and attitudes. Moreover, as every one of us is likely to have in mind a “private list” of analysts we genuinely respect (those to whom we would refer a family member or a close friend), and these lists cannot be all identical with the “official list” of training analysts, the forced idealization of an official list may inadvertently lead to an actual devaluation.
The category of training analyst is itself being criticized by several authors. Bernfeld (1962) writes. “We possess no way by which we can rationally rank our membership into Good, Very Good, and The Best Analysts. . . . By singling out a few members . . . implying that they are the best analysts, we confuse fantasy and magic with reality factors . . . [and] disturb perceptibly the transference in the personal analysis” (p. 481). Lussier (1991; see Wallerstein, 1993) also feels that having a separate class of training analysts is destructive:
Can the science of psychoanalysis, by definition, admit, without inner inconsistencies, of two classes of analysts: The High Priests and the ordinary ones? For the unconscious phantasy formation of any candidate, the fact of being analysed by a member of the select group cannot but feed the unconscious belief in a special magic power, the phallic power, with which his “special” analyst has been invested. . . .What a fertile ground for idealization, unconscious magical participation to a special power through identification, a pathogenic transferential relation that can hardly be analysed [Lussier, 1991, p. 16].
A Brazilian analyst, Luiz Meyer, created quite a stir in the 2001 IPA conference of training analysts when he described becoming a training analyst as a pursuit of status and power, and discussed training analysis as stimulating narcissistic gratification, fostering an atmosphere with paranoiac qualities, and creating a tyranny veiled in academic clothing. In his subsequent paper (Meyer, 2003) he further elaborates his devastating deconstruction of the “official” training analysis as a fetish and as an ideological structure, and suggests that “every discriminated category of analyses should be abolished” (p. 1257).
Outlining the history of training analysts and institutes, Zusman (1988) speaks of “The Eitingon syndrome.” Eitingon treated Freud’s work as sacrosanct and organized the Berlin Institute accordingly. “The Committee” running the psychoanalytic movement acquired the characteristics of a sect or a secret society (a process described by numerous scholars, notably Roazen, 1975, and Weisz, 1975), and these were transmitted to all institutes, training committees, and local societies. “The Eitingon syndrome is a transference phenomenon defined by the transposition of a petrified bipersonal relationship (Eitingon/Freud) to the institutional level, where it then multiplies by ‘regenerating’ the original pair in each training analyst and his or her candidate” (Zusman, 1988, p. 361). This observation parallels Benjamin’s (1997) comment, “The seduction by knowledge as power remained the unanalyzed transference in the geneology of analytic training, the unconscious basis of authority that leads us back to our ideal father” (pp. 792–793).
The intrusion of institute dynamics into a candidate’s personal analysis, most prominent in those institutes which still practice reporting, in spite of the arguments raised against it (Kairys, 1964), has provoked Kernberg’s (1986) critique of the “hypocrisy and dishonest manipulation” involved in “the dramatic contradiction between hiding one’s personality in order not to influence the candidate’s analysis while actually influencing the candidate’s progression behind his back” (p. 817).
But the issue is not limited to reporting. Another intense intrusion may occur when a candidate is admitted while already in analysis with an analyst who is not a training analyst. Some institutes require termination of the ongoing analysis and initiation of a new one with a training analyst, irrespective of the feelings of either trainee or original analyst. To me this procedure suggests that the idealization of training analysts has led us to lose our respect for the integrity, continuity, and natural course of the analytic process. Consequently we present a negative role model to our trainees. A second analysis is usually a blessing (even when the first one was conducted by a senior training analyst), but our analytic knowledge indicates it should be chosen and timed by the analysand rather than forced by administrators.
——————————
* Training Analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic Society; member, IPTAR
emanuel@psy.haifa.ac.il
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:52 am
Comment from Marian Tolpin:
Marian is very pleased by the responses to her commentary on the TA controversy. Much as she would like to respond to them, she regrets that she cannot; she is now at her home, in hospice, dying of cancer. Nevertheless, she wants everyone to know that she is reading their posts on the blog and she appreciates the very interesting and thoughtful reactions.
May 4th, 2008 at 4:27 am
Comment for Arnold Richards:
I would also like to correct the record. The initial post stated that it was rejected by the IPA newsletter. In fact it was rejected by the Executive Committee of the IPA. This raises the issue as to whether an editor of a newsletter should have the same editorial freedom as the editor of a journal.