ABSTRACT
The primary and ideal version of the task faced by training institutes is simple: to help aspiring candidates become competent. They receive assistance in developing their knowledge and skills as practitioners. Clearly, other factors are at work in the training process that compete with a single-minded devotion to needs of candidates to develop into skilled practitioners. The most obvious one is the need of the profession itself to regulate access to the field, to monitor standards and control for competence. Scrutinizing the history of psychoanalysis, one would have no difficulty identifying leaders, starting with Freud himself, who with seeming ruthlessness and arrogance have held on to their dominant positions and exerted control over psychoanalytic institutions. Standardization - the process in which procedures and norms become institutionalized - leads to predictability, easier replication, and a sense of stability. If we are open to the idea of learning more about psychoanalytic training we need to allow for a variety of new initiatives.
