It’s hard to know how to choose an analytic training institute. I’ve written a bit about the institute landscape in New York, and I expect I’ll continue to do so. Here, though, I intend to lay out the questions I suggest potential candidates (students of psychoanalysis) ask when deciding where to train:
Questions for yourself
What are my training priorities? Instruction? Theoretical perspective? Culture? Length (or rapidity) of training? IPA membership? APsaA membership? IARPP membership? History? Hierarchy? Diversity? Openness to difference/relationship to “other-ness”? Training requirements? Analytic requirements? Cost? Post-training community? Geography? Acceptance or rejection of virtual training and treatment?
Some of these questions will matter to you more than others. You will find it helpful to know your views, your preferences, as you embark on the process of selecting an institute or training program.
Questions for candidates at institutes you’re considering
Many of us spend our professional lives in the communities in which we train.
The institute landscape can be opaque and difficult to get to know. Institutes have famously bad web sites, and many have aging membership populations.
For these reasons, the best way to get to know what it would be like to train somewhere is to talk to people who are training there.
You would be wise to talk to as many candidates as you can at the places that interest you, so you can triangulate your way through the thicket of people’s idiosyncratic experiences to something like a coherent, cohesive understanding of just what it might be like to spend two, four, ten, or fifty years in a community.
I often say that training is a four-legged stool: instruction, your own analysis (“training analysis”), supervised analyses you conduct as a clinician (“control cases”), and the community you are joining. How you weight the various legs of this stool depends very much on you. My two cents: instruction and the community are the two most important variables, as, generally speaking, notwithstanding the restrictions institutes put on “acceptable training analysts” and “acceptable control case supervisors,” at the end of the day, you will find an analyst, and supervisors, who are good for you. Your analyst is one person, and choosing an institute based solely on one person seems unwise to me. Your control case supervisors will be one, two, or three people. So, ditto…. But instruction? That’s a big chunk of time. And the community? Well, depending on how you approach both training and life after training, this could be the whole shebang. It was for me. Nothing was more important when I was choosing.
So….
Here are a few questions I recommend asking as you contemplate this potentially momentous decision. All of the questions matter, but you will weight their answers differently, depending on your priorities (as discussed above).
Instruction
What is the curriculum like? Who does the teaching? How is the teaching? What is the trajectory of the teaching and the curriculum? (Are they getting better? Getting worse? Modernizing? Stagnating?)
What is the format of classes? Are they lectures? Seminars? Discussions? Formal? Informal?
Where do classes take place? In an institutional setting? In instructors’ homes or offices?
When do classes take place?
Training analysis
What are the requirements when it comes to training analysis? When must you start? How frequently must you go? For how long must you go?
Who constitutes the universe of pre-approved training analysts?
What is the procedure for getting approval for analysts not pre-approved? What types of situations have resulted in approvals of waivers? What types of analysts have been approved for waivers? What types of situations and analysts have not been approved for waivers?
What are the implications of the answers to the questions above for cost? Financial cost? Temporal cost? Notwithstanding some from the old guard who pooh-pooh geographic considerations, where your analyst is matters. You will spend years traveling multiple times a week to their office. [I have had two analyses – for my first, over the course of the twelve years of the analysis, I traveled 15 minutes to my sessions for the first couple of years – and over an hour for the rest. You may rest assured that travel time increased the cost of my analysis – and, of course, provided valuable grist for the mill. In my second analysis, I traveled about 35 minutes for the first few years of the analysis, and then, after moving offices, walked less than ten minutes to each session. This, too, affected both the content and the experience.]
Supervision
I wrote above that I don’t necessarily recommend choosing an institute on the basis of the supervision you might hope to receive. That said, it’s important to know some things about supervision, as it does have a huge impact on your development as an analyst.
What is the approved universe of supervisors? Under what circumstances might you be permitted to depart from that approved universe? Under what circumstances might you wish to depart from that approved universe?
How much supervision is required? How much is available? Is there any provision for free supervision (whether for control cases or, prior to the development of control cases, for psychotherapy)?
What do people typically end up paying for their supervision?
Community
How large is the community? How many members/faculty? How many candidates? What are the demographics of the community? Ages? Identity markers? Diversity?
How large is my cohort likely to be? What are cohort structures and interactions like? (At some institutes, cohorts barely exist, and candidates progress mostly at their own pace; at others, the cohort is very much a group.)
What is the culture of the place? Is it hierarchical? Egalitarian? What’s the style of interaction?
How, and how often, do members of the community interact? Online? In person? At formal, clinical events? At informal, social events?
What are the politics of the place? (Every place has politics!) What are the “big ‘p’ politics” and what are the “small ‘p’ politics”? Is it a progressive place? Conservative? How does it handle controversial, or complicated, questions of the day? Does it erupt in flame wars? Does it avoid flame wars?
What is morale like? Among candidates? Among members/faculty?
What is involvement like? Is community life robust? Is it sclerotic?
Progression process/length of training
This isn’t a “leg” of training, per se, but it matters.
How long do classes go?
How long does supervised control work go?
How long does training typically take?
What is the significance and import of graduating (or of not yet having graduated)? Often, graduation is a distinction that doesn’t have a real-world impact – it only matters within the community. But how does it matter in the community? What becomes possible when you graduate? What doesn’t depend on graduation?
What is the process like? Is it gentle? Kind? Supportive? Brutal? Hostile? Traumatic? Do people “fail” along the way? How? What’s it like for those who fail, or whose progression goes more slowly than they might like?
How often do candidates leave? Transfer to other institutes? Simply give up on becoming an analyst?
Conclusion
The institute you choose will determine a lot about the rest of your life. It undoubtedly will affect the kind of analyst you become, and it likely will affect your professional, intellectual, and social lives profoundly.
Choose wisely!
