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PAH..TISAN REVIEW
Robert Michels:
I don't know
if
that is true. A lot depends on your frame of
reference. On Park Avenue and 79th Street it may look that way. If you look
at the United States, there are more candidates
in
psychoanalytic training than
there have ever been before in the history of the world. They are not only
in
the great coastal cities, which were the major centers for psychoanalysis forty
years ago--New York, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles. In
those older communities the growing number of analysts have had more com–
petition, and some of their institutes have had diminishing supplies of
candidates. At the same time there has been an expansion in the number of
institutes, in cities allover the country-Dallas, New Orleans, Atlanta,
Miami,
St. Louis, Seattle--that didn't exist fifty years ago, institutes which have candi–
dates and training analysts. Non-psychiatrist candidates now make up about
thirty or forty percent of the candidates
in
the institutes of the American
Psychoanalytic Association. There are other institutes connected with the
International Psychoanalytic Association whose candidates are largely non–
physicians, candidates who to a great extent were excluded from training a few
decades ago.
From the point of view of an old established American training institute
in one of the large cities on the coast, fewer candidates may be applying. But
if
you look at the totality of the training of analysts
in
the United States, more
analysts are being trained. A lot of non-physicians are being trained and the
geographic distribution is broader than it used to be.
Elaine Hoffinan Baruch:
I would like to know whether Frederick Crews
and Jeffiey Masson have ever debated one another. Jeffiey Masson has exactly
the opposite position in his assault on truth theory and faults Freud for turn–
ing away from his earlier theory of seduction, and many radical feminists have
taken this further. All this is proof of Freud's theory that in the unconscious
opposites are the same. These two are on opposite sides and they both seem
to be believed by large contingents.
Robert Michels:
I don't think we have a lot to learn about psychoanalysis
from those debates. They each have passionate beliefS and use Freud as a sym–
bol in an argument they are constructing. They may be saying something of
importance about our society, but it doesn't have much to do with psycho–
analysis. That doesn't mean it's not important, it's just that psychoanalysis
isn't really a participant in that debate.
Alan Roland:
Psychoanalysis has become more open, more diversified, and
has more theoretical paradigms---at least in my experience of the last thirty–
five years. You see changes in the field. For me psychoanalysis is much more
interesting today, with controversy rather than following existing theories.
