All This and None of It Is Being an Analyst in Training: The Experience of Integration and the Construction of Analytic Identity

Abstract

Starting from the reflection on the experience of being a candidate in training, from reading the article “Identifications in training - the unending road to Thebes” (Oliveira et al., 2024) and the book Dear Candidate (Busch, 2021), the authors aim to reflect on how a psychotherapist can become a psychoanalyst.

How can the candidate build their narrative from the common institutional story? What does it mean to be a candidate in training, a newcomer, someone caught between the idealized dream of becoming a psychoanalyst, but also facing internal and external tensions? How can one reconcile so many voices within one- self in the early analysis sessions? How can one discover their own voice?

Assuming writing as autobiographical and honesty as the best quality of a text (Ogden, 2022), the authors seek to reflect on the entry into the Society as a new perspective on the professional experience of candidates, the integration of new learnings into clinical practice, and the construction of an analytical identity. They question what it means to be a psychoanalyst, contemplating on the idealization of the psychoanalyst, the encounter with one’s own analyst outside of the analysis sessions, the development of negative capability, unconscious identifications, necessary disidentifications, and the integration of the analytical function in candidates.

The growing sense of belonging to an Institute and to the Society, in the authors’ view, seems to be supported by the trust that fellow candidates and psychoanalysts place in new members, reflected in the tendency to refer to “candidates” as “analysts in training.” In this context, analysts in training dare to think about their more unconscious identifications and differentiate themselves from others; the contact and collaboration with peers and psychoanalysts, the readings that the training allows, but also the ability to make use of these tools in the context of supervision, and the opened path in personal analysis, invite candidates to think for themselves.

The authors aim to analyze the impact of reflective pondering on such central themes in the training of an analyst, proposing that a candidate who begins this journey with their references in sight, should allow themselves to find the path within, understanding the importance of continuing in relation to others, tolerating fears, and trusting in their ability to endure doubts. Having reached this place, their own, the analyst in training becomes more available to the here and now, to the emerging experience in the analytic relationship (Levine, 2022).

As Freud, the first analyst in training, said in his autobiography: “I was occupied in finding my way in my new profession”. Likewise, the candidate/analyst in training faces an essential question that points to their future: finding the way home, towards an increasingly integrated and, above all, deeply personal analytical function, made of all this and none of this, which is to walk between doubts and be available for this broad construction.