Getting There: The Unfolding Potential of Psychoanalysis, A Personal View

Even though psychoanalysis has the potential to free the mind it can also (however unwittingly) be used to bind it. This paradoxical tendency is especially noticeable in some psychoanalytic trainings, when students can be under pressures to comply with accepted theory and practice and, in some cases, to toe the line in their training analysis and/or in their supervised cases. We therefore have to be increasingly mindful of the ways in which our training of psychoanalytic students can foster a false extension of psychoanalysis, by which the practitioner can become bound to a theory rather than be freed by it.