Introducing psychiatric residents to psychoanalysis: a visiting analyst's perspective

The serious decline in applicants for psychoanalytic training mandates the attention of psychoanalytic educators. If students are to be drawn to psychoanalysis, creative methods must be employed to convey the vigor and excitement of work in the field. The author describes two experiences as a visiting analyst, in a university hospital psychiatric residency in which there is almost no regular exposure to psychoanalytic thinking. Because he was dissatisfied with an approach that stressed literature review and psychotherapy case presentations and supervision, he developed a teaching technique through which he was able to show the residents how he thought analytically and self-analytically. This teaching method is discussed in terms of Stein's (1988) injunction that analysts reveal more about the process of their thinking when they write, his description of how Bertram D. Lewin taught by encouraging analytic candidates to free-associate as a method of understanding new case material, and Arlow's (1972) view of the centrality of identification in education.