Routledge Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

Over the past century psychoanalysis has gone on to establish training institutes, professional societies, accreditation procedures, and models of education, thus bringing into uneasy alliance all three impossible pursuits. In Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education, Emanuel Berman turns his attention to the current status and future prospects of this daunting project. Berman is ideally suited to tackle the impossibility of psychoanalytic education. A graduate of two psychoanalytic institutes, one in Israel and one in America, he has devoted much of his professional life to psychoanalytic education and the organizational issues embedded in it. In Impossible Training, Berman describes the complex emotional and organizational dynamics of psychoanalytic training. Placing these issues within the context of major controversies in psychoanalytic history, he shows how generations of students have either idealized a "proper analytic identity," which evolves into a persecutory ideal, or rebelled against these standards. Are such persecuting and infantilizing trends inherent in analytic training, he asks, or can psychoanalytic education transcend them through changes in its structure and rules? For Berman, the relational and intersubjective trends in contemporary psychoanalysis call for changes in analytic supervision, not least of which is heightened attentiveness to the many relationships that gain expression in the supervisory process. Envisioned in this relational manner, supervision can become a more personal experience, less guarded, and more conducive to the development of a fertile transitional space between supervisor and supervisee. Anchoring his consideration of the present in the controversies of the past, Berman concludes by considering the mission of psychoanalytic educators today: to provide trainees with the resources to cope creatively with the as yet unknown challenges of tomorrow. Review "This book is an important contribution to the growing literature of the critique of psychoanalytic education...it certainly enriches the analysis and instruments for change for psychoanalytic institutes at this time. This should be a volume of great interest to all psychoanalysts, particularly those involved in psychoanalytic education as faculty or students, and those involved in the administration of societies and institutes, in whose hands rests the ultimate responsibility for dealing with the urgent problems of psychoanalytic education that Berman highlights. It is absolutely indispensable reading for anyone involved in psychoanalytic supervision..." - Otto Kernberg, M.D., JAPA "There can be little doubt that psychoanalytic education is in a state of crisis. Creative solutions are urgently needed, and Emanuel Berman's new volume has answers the call. With painstaking scholarship and a contemporary perspective that is historically informed, Berman delivers a penetrating analysis of the daunting challenges in psychoanalytic training and a set of suggestions that demand our attention. I strongly recommend this book to psychoanalytic educators and candidates alike." - Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., Brown Foundation Chair of Psychoanalysis "Emanuel Berman's Impossible Training is a wise book. While he stresses the basic mutuality and joint vulnerability of the participants in both analysis and supervision, he also acknowledges the unavoidable asymmetry and inequality in these relationships. He advocates no universal methods but provides vivid clinical material to suggest multiple possible approaches to training and analytic work. His stance is humanistic. The writing is fresh and alive. All psychoanalytic educators and students will enjoy reading this book and will learn from it." - Judy L. Kantrowitz, Ph.D., Author, The Patient's Impact on the Analyst (Analytic Press, 1996) "A tour de force! This illuminating, clearly reasoned, and insightful exposition should be essential reading for al