Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes psychoanalytic trainees' doubts and uncertainties about the thoroughness of their own training analyzes and how this effects therapeutic outcomes for themselves and for their own analysands, paying particular attention to institutional constraints and contradictions.

Paper long abstract:

The "training analysis"—in which the psychoanalyst in training is him- or herself psychoanalyzed—is one of the three main pillars of psychoanalytic training. Unlike other types of non-training analyzes, the training analysis serves not only to encourage the analysand to explore his or her own personal and emotional orientations as fully as possible, but also to teach the prospective psychoanalyst how a proper analysis is to be conducted and to verify to the training institute that a candidate has in fact been psychoanalyzed. As a result, dual roles abound: the candidate is at once an analysand, but also a future psychoanalyst in training; the training analyst is at once an analyst who feels responsible for the care of her patient, but also a gatekeeper for the psychoanalytic institute. I examine how these conflicting roles and expectations affect the experience of the training analysis from the trainee's point of view, focusing especially on trainees' struggles with how open and honest to be about their own problems and conflicts and on the gaps many trainees experience between how they imagine an analysis is supposed to unfold and how their own analytic experiences actually do unfold. I explore how doubts and uncertainties generated by institutional constraints and contradictions affect therapeutic outcome for both trainees and for the people whom they analyze. I note that the gaps between normative expectations and personal experiences in training analyzes raise important questions about how psychoanalytic practice is taught and learned.