ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that pre-training therapy is the first domain in which the psychodynamic imagination is cultivated. It focuses on the transmission of therapeutic knowledge and the methods of doubt management the institute can call upon to safeguard the psychodynamic vision from the provocations of dissent. The fact that the redemptive aim of psychotherapy is fundamental to its design has rendered therapy for the majority of its practitioners into more than simply a medical cure. Ernest Gellner in his The Psychoanalytic Movement also criticised the apolitical propensity of psychotherapeutic culture: Freudianism was different from the beginning it had within itself a certain tendency towards political quietism. As the therapeutic community is internally fragmented by processes of ‘identification’ this is helped by concomitant processes of ‘differentiation’ that are also operative in training schools.