ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the issue of power inside psychoanalytic institutions. These institutions exert very real political power through their selection of candidates and the orientation they choose for theoretical teaching, and therefore they create a sort of analytic “ideology”. The aim of psychoanalysis is ostensibly to take individual internal freedom, freedom of thought, and creativity as far as they can go. Psychoanalytic psychotherapists draw their theoretical and technical frames of reference from psychoanalysis and the internal organization of the societies for psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and their training institutes are likewise often modelled directly upon the psychoanalytic societies. S. Freud therefore undeniably intended to dominate the psychoanalytic movement while being absolutely unable to take power within it, except in hidden ways and by means of personal influence. Psychoanalytic societies are therefore one of the places where psychoanalysts wield the actual power that they deny themselves in their professional situation.
