Unwrapping the Psychoanalytic Education; On Orienting Candidates with Freud

This paper argues that, despite being highly educated, psychoanalytic candidates need a particular orientation to become students of the strange and offensive unconscious, to help them learn to work together in the pursuit of the repressed. In this paper, the author describes an 8-week introductory course she has cotaught for the past 5 years at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. As a kind of "Freud aperitivo course," it gives candidates something to nibble on to stimulate the appetite for depth and to stomach difficulties that arise. The rationale for such a course is based on Freud's ability and process in discovering psychoanalysis and the unconscious. Candidates can witness Freud's persistence in his highly stirring discoveries, finding clues within himself to guide him in discovering the unconscious and the universal. As candidates embark on their own stirring, anxiety-provoking processes of analytic discovery, they are invited to identify with Freud's pleasure in uncovering, to enable them to become a group capable of psychoanalytic learning. Next, the author walks the reader through what this course has to offer.