For intensive in-person psychoanalysis in psychoanalytic training: Do we know where we are going?

The paper makes a detailed argument for retaining as central the importance of intensive immersive in-person analysis for personal analysis and for control cases in psychoanalytic training. Fundamental is personal analysis and evaluation of the capacities of the analyst-in-training including, importantly, a capacity for analytic listening and intervention. A concern is discussed that recent International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) rule changes to propose a less intensive and immersive training may undermine this foundational base. In-person analysis allows simultaneous different perspectives, the rawness of immediate experience including the bodily, the sexual or the aggressive to emerge and be felt, and for the emergence of different types of transference that may include enactments by the patient or by the analyst. These lead to a fuller psychoanalytic understanding and are intrinsic to a capacity for growth needed to become a psychoanalyst. Brief vignettes from complex cases of adult, adolescent and child analysis illustrate this view of the centrality of in-person psychoanalysis.