Experiences in the Hungarian psychoanalytic training model

In this article, I present my findings based on the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of six interviews of senior training and supervising psychoanalysts of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. I tried to uncover the participants’ experiences with their psychoanalytic training, which took place in the repressive climate of the last phase of Socialism in Hungary during the 1970s and the 1980s. The interviewees were trained according to the Hungarian training model, known as the Budapest model. It is a specific version of the Eitingon model, which is the most widely used training system in the psychoanalytic training institutes of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) worldwide. According to the Eitingon model, the mandatory two supervisors of the candidate are different from the candidate’s training analyst. Thus, the supervisory experience is differentiated from the training analytic experience. In the Budapest model, known as control-analysis, the training analyst and the first supervisor were the same person. The results suggest that the societal climate had a substantial impact on the interviewees’ training experiences; however, the overdetermined nature of the relationship between them and their training analysts, as well as the interconnectedness of the personal and professional spaces, did not necessarily diminish their professional maturation.