Putting practice into theory: making the training analyst system coherent

The question of the training analysis demands a complicated set of answers that engage the issue at different levels of human organization. Historically, the training analysis has been the central feature of the tripartite model of psychoanalytic education. Internal and external pressures have burdened the training analysis and called its legitimacy into question. This problem of legitimacy amounts to a lack of coherence in the training analyst (TA) system. This lack engenders idealized fantasies of the role of the TA, in which the TA embodies special talents and attributes, and of the system that sanctions that role. This idealization is haunted by its opposite: a melancholic devaluation of psychoanalysis and a fear that it will collapse. Recent literature on the analyst's position in the psychoanalytic process emphasizes the analyst's position as decentered and conflicted. The analyst's decentered, conflicted status goes against this idealizing impulse. An attempt is made to wed analytic values, and what we know about the analyst's role in the analytic process, into a more coherent, consistent position regarding the analysis of candidates.