The IPA model of training and its buried mistake.*
Fusing the Executive Committee and the Training Committee of the IPA in the early years of establishing training was a first mistake. It was recognised very early on that the distinction between the team that was running the
analytic organization became the defacto team running training. The mistake is that the role of the executive was to manage the members’ affairs, while the ITC was to manage seekers of membership. The fusion of the two
committees created a case of conflict of interest that plagued the IPA in every aspects of its future varied activities Anna Freud (1938) called it wrong to confuse teaching with doing analysis, and for the setup of training analysis permitting choosing the trainees from the circle of interested candidates. Eitingon, the father of training psychoanalysis apologized to the ITC (report,1927) that didactic analysis and therapeutic analysis are
undifferentiated because they are not well defined. Their fusion could be called the confusion between training and becoming a member of the IPA. Benedek (1962) talked about training in her time indicating fusion of analysis and teaching the candidate at the same time by giving him explanations of what was done in his analysis. The IPA put
too much faith in personal analysis and expected it to cure all the ills of fusing the administrative issues in training with training itself. Limentaini (19172) was more specific in calling that fusion a mistake. He said that institutional training is probably antithetical to analysis itself. *This early mistake was unavoidable* because in the early years of
establishing training and initiating regional societies forced such an overlap. However, there was no excuse not to correct it when the situation changed.
The mistake was admitted but because there was no alternative, and efforts were made to mitigate it, but not to correct it. Thus, with time the mistake got complicated. The trend to ‘perfect’ training as a remedy leaned toward changing didactic analysis into personal analysis with limitations on its minimum requirement for accrediting it. Supervision took care of the other aspect of didactic analysis and was also given quantitative attributes in the number of cases and duration of treatment. As result of perfecting the mistake a new mistake was made: *the notion of accreditation and looking for standards of proficiency appeared as a natural expectation of training*. This was a mistake because it emphasized the fusion of the two separate authorities by creating the tools for practicing a fictitious power over the candidates. As in many other occasions, mistakes that first seemed unavoidable could continue unnoticed for very long times after succumbing to them, and the end of the circumstances that allowed them. I would rephrase this and say that the IPA executive discovered some advantages in that fusion so its membership-over the years- kept on perfecting that mistake, and what seemed at the beginning an inevitability
turned it to “an acceptable state of affair so let us make the best of it”. Naturally, the concept of the training analyst has ‘somehow’ found its place in the psychoanalytic vocabulary. Psychoanalysis was born within complications and
created many others; but the complications created by the IPA system of training are different. The transference\countertransference, cronyism, idealizing and demonizing, etc, gave the issue a different colour: the
institute became the actual (virtual) society. Candidate suffered, psychoanalysis suffered, the institution lost its credibility.
Nevertheless, the decaying IPA model persisted. A candidate in the US once said to Lacan: “the reason I will never attack the instituted forms of analysis is because they give me a comfortable and unproblematic routine”.
The unavoidable mistake of fusing training and administration led -very subtly- to another overlooked mistake, but this one was avoidable if there was any intention of correcting the first one. The mistake was putting the three aspects of training, personal analysis (didactic), supervision of practice, and theoretical seminars under one roof; creating the “institute”. The mistake here is obvious: a senior or training analyst should not- in any way- be assumed to be equally superior theoretically, clinically, and technically. Thus, the notion of the institute as the place
of training by training analysts reversed the cause-effect relationship between proper training and the training-analysts. Training is supposed to be done by the analysts who could perform it best, and those should be the
faculty of the institute, irrespective of qualifying as training and supervising analysts . But since the faculties of the institutes are made of training analysts they were considered able to carry on the the three tasks of training better than the none training analysts. There was nothing to force that idea except the momentum of extending the domination of the old generation over future psychoanalysts.In other words: training in IPA institutes has formalized this mistake in a manner that inhibited correcting it. The ones to correct it were the ones who would be affected by the correction (sounds familiar!!). Somehow (I personally do not know how it happened) didactic analysis changed to therapeutic personal analysis. The candidate was treated as a patient and not a trenee. *In fact
this development should be considered a serious one; *firstly, didactic analysis (learning how to do analysis) was abolished. Secondly, it is technically wrong to impose on a candidate to undergo therapy as condition to be graduated. Candidates are forcibly psychoanalysed, when they merely apply for learning analysis. Thirdly, we do not have a criterion for health that would make psychoanalysis a requirement for the candidate to undertake. The duration of that aspect of training from the beginning of the training movement shows that it was not meant to be
for therapy. The therapeutic outcome of that experience was never the main consideration (some early analysts were even exempted by Freud from that aspect, or it was done in very casual ways and for very short times).
The domination of the training analysts on training needed and caused changing the rules of the game. Training in the IPA modality had an overt purpose, which is meeting the standards decided by the ones who would benefit from it, and a covert purpose which was indoctrinating the candidates and creating the inner group that would inherit the present group in ruling the scene. However, it should be said that this modality as the only possible one at the time psychoanalysis was initiated as a movement, and its continuation after its shelf-life contributed to raising the status of psychoanalysis beyond any expectations in a quick pase, but because it was founded on mistakes it backfired and after few years of success it began a faster decline than its rise.
Although the forefathers of psychoanalysis did not have the alternative to that fusion which *we have now (talk about in the next post)*, it should not have been an excuse to keep the an existing cast of training analysts
in control of training to hand it to their cronies (playing musical chairs of position of power with a list of turns instead of music). I think it would be redunda/nt (yet useful) to show that *if* the two functions of organizing and training were separate, the arguments and disagreement that emerged right after Freud’s death and we still have today would not have had a chance to distract us from the real problem. The IPA is facing the deterioration of the theory of psychoanalysis, receding interest in psychoanalysis without a serious plan to dealing with it, a chaotic field
of psychotherapies, and a field of humanities that is expecting some serious work on ‘psychoanalysis’. Let me repeat that *the problem with training is fusing training with the *administration of the organization,
and putting all aspects of training under one roof (institute) and training analysts. The IPA is under pressure to shape up or to ship off.
Is there an alternative? Erich Jantsch (1980) said: “When a system, in its self-organization, reaches beyond the boundaries of its identity, it becomes creative. In its self-organization paradigm, evolution is the result of self-transcendence at all levels (183).
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*A.Fayek, Ph.D.*
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