ABSTRACT
The French and Swiss Institutes are the considered to be the most ‘open’; the three Italian Training Institutes adopt a middle path, but the didactic analysis is strictly a part of training. There was a period in the history of the psychoanalytic movement when tensions in this field that had existed for some time came out into the open, as those of us who are older will remember. The phenomena that arise can easily be read by some candidates as being concerned with power, and in this way personal anxieties may find a ‘political’ outlet, where what are felt to be injustices and authoritarian prevarications are read as ‘class’ factors. The candidate wanted to please the supervisor, and the supervisor wrote down that the candidate did not seem very competitive; the candidate wanted to conform to a certain reserve that he had noticed in the supervisor, and the supervisor judged him to be a little cool.
