Proffered Voices: What does Psychoanalytic Education and Training mean for Psychoanalytic Development and Identity?

Taking account of previously unheard perspectives of the training and post-qualification experiences of volunteer participants of three psychoanalytic training institutes in the United Kingdom, this qualitative research study explores what psychoanalytic training and education mean for the development and identity of psychoanalytic practitioners. Graduate practitioners, accredited by the British Psychoanalytic Council, with at least five years post-qualification experience in psychoanalysis, psychoanalytical and/or psychodynamic psychotherapy, were invited to participate in individual interviews. In the context of an hour-long, digitally recorded, individual, face-to-face interview participants were asked to speak freely about their experience of psychoanalytic training and education. Encouraged to engage in spontaneous narrative in response to a semi-structured interview schedule designed around four main areas including personal background, theoretical, clinical and educational aspects of training, used by the researcher only as aide- memoir, participants were asked to speak of their training and post-training experiences, including professional identity development and career satisfaction. Findings contribute to understanding in relation to subjective experience in psychoanalytic training and to what training and post-graduate development mean for the life-long endeavour of becoming a psychoanalyst/ psychotherapist. Overall findings lend credence to some of the deleterious effects of a hierarchical system within psychoanalytic training institutes, pointing to a need for innovation and change, with emphasis on reporting systems and teaching practice. In keeping with a Grounded Theory approach the literature review, carried out post field-work, points to continuing debate in the need for structural and organisational change in training institutes centred upon power in the curriculum and the training analyst system. Debate also lends weight to the need for further research in psychoanalysis, alongside the development of greater interdisciplinary collaboration, and a need for extra-institutional academic affiliations, together with advances in advocacy as a means of increasing understanding of psychoanalytic work within the general public and in health care providers. Graduates simultaneously affirm the role of psychoanalytic training in personal and professional identity development and career satisfaction, and the value of psychoanalysis as a theory of human mental functioning and a mental health discipline, as inestimable