ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the proceeding chapters of this book. The book describes psychoanalytic socialisation as ‘affirmative’ since it inculcates largely conservative dispositions. If these affirmative devices promote a tacit ‘social contract’ of conformity, peer-fellowship, and a union of aims between novices and the initiated, the book shows that they may generate low tolerance for individual transgressions of institutionally defined norms and boundaries. In an anthropological sense, shared sentiments of conformity and solidarity thus unite the single school as effectively as do shared antagonisms towards rivals. The book identifies a species of professional socialisation which surreptitiously requests a robust ideological commitment. Psychodynamic socialisation also distinguishes itself from medical training, for in the latter ‘concepts of the person’ are less explicitly declared than mutely implied, and the content transmitted neither shores up socialisation devices nor an energetic self-redemptive project.
