The International Psychoanalytic website is pleased to present an important op ed piece by Marian Tolpin. This eminent analyst from Chicago explains clearly, articulately, and persuasively why the training analyst title should be retired. The Executive Board of the International Psychoanalytic Association would not permit its publication. The International Psychoanalytic Blog stands for freedom of expression and welcomes comments on this important and timely article.
Jane S. Hall
Op Ed Editor
Thoughts on the Group Self of psychoanalysis,
in light of the controversy over Training Analysis status
Marian Tolpin, M.D.
There is currently a great deal of debate taking place in psychoanalytic training centers, around the world and here in the United States, concerning whether there should be a separate category of graduate psychoanalysts designated as specially qualified to analyze future psychoanalysts. Among those who do believe that there needs to be such a category, further debate has raged on what that special qualification might entail and on the particulars of how (when, by whom) it should be established and evaluated.
In what follows below I reflect on my own experiences in regard to this category and on the lengthy history of the Training Analysis question as a disruptive force in institutional psychoanalysis. As I consider why this fractious issue, which has caused so much dissension in our profession, remains perpetually unresolved, I conclude that the Training Analysis serves a Group Self cohesive function. As such, it joins a list of other myths that have served that function in the past; myths that were clung to but ultimately had to be relinquished in the face of contradictory evidence.
1. The myth of the “special” analyst:
First, in the interest of full disclosure, let me state that I have been a training and supervising analyst since 1975, which means that I underwent an analysis with an analyst who had been designated as “special’ and, after further evaluation, was designated as equally fit to treat and train others who wished to ascend to my position. I have enjoyed my status as a training analyst. It has not made me a better analyst, but it is better to be a “have” than a “have not”, and it has enhanced my career.
I see the training analyst controversy as a symptom of the vulnerability of the Group Self of psychoanalysis. When that Group Self is threatened and vulnerable from, for example, charges that psychoanalysis is an “inexact science” or from patients who do not get better, there is a propensity to rally around a special analyst (Freud) or a self-annointed institutional group of specially designated analysts (the Boardd of Professional Standards [BOPS], even in the face of contradictory evidence.
The current insistence that BOPS knows what is ‘right’ in terms of training and analysis continues Freud’s tradition of always tenaciously insisting that he was right (until he was ready to change his theory). For example, Freud was ”right” about his seduction hypothesis, until forced to acknowledge he was wrong. Or he was “right” that Dora (1905) had a vengeful father transference to him, abruptly ending her treatment to revenge herself against him (as she wished to revenge herself against her father) and wanting to continue treatment with him in order to exact even more revenge. Thus, he was “right” to refuse her further treatment. Likewise, Freud insisted he was “right” about the Wolfman’s passive anality or the ubiquitous female castration complex as constituting absolute psychic “bedrock”, and about the “psychic inertia” responsible for interminable analyses (1937).
Our current example of ‘special-analyst-who-knows’ is BOPS who ”knows best” and is “right” to insist that it is the ultimate arbiter of psychoanalytic standards, and that only it is preeminently qualified to uphold the standards that it sets. That is, BOPS maintains that graduates of its own-approved institutes require its committee’s oversight and imprimatur; graduation is simply not sufficient qualification for either certification or training analyst status, for which certification has been designated (by BOPS) as the “right” first step.
This method of control over all aspects of training, including controlling the flow of future analysts designated as equally special, has a long history in our field and touches on my own personal history, as well. Some forty years ago, the Piers’ report, commissioned by then-president of the American Psychoanalytic Association Samuel Ritvo, concluded that certification and training analyst appointment seriously weakened the field. The report was critical of one group’s—BOPS—arrogating to itself the functions of overseeing both institutes and appointments in accord with what they think is analysis. At the time of my training, I also opposed and questioned this position. After I graduated, Leo Loomie, then-BOPS chair, threatened to expose the Chicago Institute if I, and a group of my peers, persisted in questioning the necessity for post-graduation certification by BOPS. Loomie wrote that he would reveal that Chicago Institute’s then-Director Gerhart Piers and then-Dean Joan Fleming had “admitted in writing to him” that they had allowed some “compassionate graduations”. However, since the 1940s, the decreasing number of new analysts, with one-third of our membership past seventy (myself included), vindicates the predictions of the Piers report: BOPS oversight was, and would continue to be, an important contributing factor in weakening American psychoanalysis.
2. Two examples of past psychoanalytic Group Self myths:
There are other myths that have been used by psychoanalysts to maintain a cohesive Group Self. Here I will mention only two from the past: The “Poor Breuer” myth and the “Eager Band of Followers” myth. The Poor Breuer myth began with Freud (1914) and was further elaborated by Ernest Jones (1953) in his account of Josef Breuer’s weakness, panic and flight from his patient Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim). Freud’s original account of Breuer’s treatment of Anna O. served his own purpose to rationalize and buttress his insistence that sexuality is the cause of neurosis. The story was that Breuer showed “distaste” for sexuality and (later) “repudiated” Freud’s view of the sexual etiology of neurosis. He claimed that an “untoward event” concerning his patient’s transference in “its crudely sexual form” led Breuer to “break off all further investigation”.
This retrospective “reconstruction” by Freud of what happened was uncritically accepted by his followers as the truth. It was then further elaborated, taking on mythic proportions, in Jones’ account, as follows. In a panic, Breuer fled from Anna O.’s “hysterical” labor, and rushed to Venice on a second honeymoon to appease his wife who was jealous of his patient. There, he impregnated her with a baby girl who would much later commit suicide in New York. However, the truth is that there was neither a flight, a Venetian honeymoon, nor a child conceived there; nor was there a suicide in New York. Hirschmuller’s biography (The Life and Work of Josef Breuer, 1989) provides indisputable documentation in the form of Breuer’s correspondence showing that he attempted to hospitalize Bertha Pappenheim after he unknowingly caused her morphine addiction; that, as was his custom, he vacationed near Vienna; that his daughter was born during Anna O’s treatment; and that she died in Vienna after taking poison to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. Yet, the myth of Poor Breuer, contrasting his panic and flight when faced with the “untoward event” of his patient’s “crude sexuality” with Freud’s steadfast insistence on the etiological bedrock of sexuality, took many generations to loosen its grip on Freud’s “Eager Band of Followers”.
In 1931 Freud was certain that his theory of girls’ “rock bottom” penis envy and castration complex was right. He lauded his “eager band of followers…[who] closed ranks” to demonstrate their agreement. When all of his followers did not join his “eager band” Freud resorted to his authority and disparaged the dissenters. Karen Horney and Melanie Klein, for example, must be “wrong”, Their objections would have required him to change his mind and revise his entire timetable of normal development and the indisputable position of the Oedipus complex as the chief motivating force for neurosis. So Freud deemed that their objections must arise from “feminist views”. Similarly, it must be Fenichel’s and Jones’ “feminist views” that led them to dispute Freud’s theory of the nuclear female castration complex.
The legacy of Freud’s insistence that he must be “right” persists as “eager bands of followers” still “close ranks” around their favorite theorist and his/her claim that one theory alone is the “pure gold” of analysis, that others’ are mere “alloys.” The same recourse to authority and disparagement is used to dispel valid disagreements, to dismiss controversial ideas or contradictory clinical evidence, and to exclude dissenters from the special group. When I was in training Ralph Greenson (1967) designated Melanie Klein’s theory as a “deviant” school, and David Rapapport (unpublished lectures in the 1960s) referred to Klein’s “id mythology”. Recently, Hanna Segal declared that British Independent analysts did not do “real” analysis. And so, the tradition–to know what is right and to disparage those who question or disagree—continues as the myth of upholding standards.
3. The myth of upholding standards—continued weakening of psychoanalysis:
In his study (2000), Unfree Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes, Douglas Kirsner squarely blames the training analyst institution for the continuing weakening of our field. (He does not neglect sociological factors promoting a decrease in analytic patients and in analysts’ prestige.) Kirsner’s intensive study of four American Psychoanalytic Association institutes is summed us as follows:
Since there is scant agreement [among analysts] about anything in detail
[theory], how can analytic ‘standards’ be other than a myth? Outside of
anointment what can be the meaning of ‘qualification’ in psychoanalysis? Where qualification is not based on an agreed body of knowledge, disintegration products abound, leaving the way open for the role of power plays, anointment, cultism, personality. There is here a folie a deux. Mystification serves the…. emotional needs of everyone in the system…. for a putative certainty that can establish a qualification as real… mystification…inspires some collusion on the part of candidates… the way this atmosphere of anointment has persisted has been through the training analysis and the appointment of those who have the right to train. These issues have always been at the heart of analytic disputes (2000, pp. 238-9).
Kirsner contributes a cogent and alarming view of psychoanalytic culture from his ‘outsider’s’ perspective. From my ‘insider’s’ perspective I have attempted to make the same case: it is time to end the training analyst institution. If not now, when? If not us, who?
Marian Tolpin, M.D.
Training and Supervising Analyst
Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis
122 South Michigan Avenue, 14th floor
Chicago, Illinois 60603, U.S.A.