Change from within in a traditional psychoanalytic institute: twenty-five years of debate and transformation at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society*

The Israel Psychoanalytic Society (IPS) and its training body, the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute, were founded by Max Eitingon in 1933–1934. In the past quarter century, it went through rather radical changes, some of which were reached by consensus, whereas others were the final outcome of fierce debates, and could be controversial to this day. In this chapter, the author summarizes some of these changes, starting roughly around 1990–when he was a junior faculty member at the Institute–and reaching the time of writing in 2015. His own critique of traditional training focuses on the dangers of the utopian dimension in training and particularly of the utopian New Person fantasy often identifiable in the more ambitious rationales of analytic education. The most widespread model of psychoanalytic training is based on the structure of the Berlin Institute, established by Max Eitingon in 1920. Towards the end of the 1980s, a process of democratic transformation has started in the IPS and in its Institute.