ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a balanced consideration to the advantages and drawbacks of different models of psychoanalytic training. When the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) was considering whether to recognise the French model, its Education Committee prepared a report for the Board of the IPA. The experience of applying to join the French Psychoanalytic Association affected the author by the way it revealed an organisation which did operate with psychoanalytic awareness. Clinical psychoanalysis requires technical competence in such things as maintaining the analytic setting, and identifying expressions of transference and unconscious connections in a patient's material. Around 1974, the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association reformed its structures so as to avoid excessive concentration of power in the hands of training analysts. Erik Erikson's book Identity: Youth and Crisis was a collection, with revisions, of articles he had published since the mid-1950s. In the book's prologue, Erikson invokes William James and Sigmund Freud, as figures on whom the concept of identity is founded.
