Professional and Personal Development After Psychoanalytic Training: Interviews with Early Career Analysts

Abstract

After analytic training, graduates position their newly acquired identity as “psychoanalyst” in the context of their broader career, contemplating whether to start new analytic cases, adapting their new knowledge base to psychotherapy practice, and deciding how to focus their professional and personal interests going forward. Using questionnaires and interviews, the Columbia Postgraduate Analytic Practice Study (CPAPS) has prospectively tracked the career trajectory of 69 of 76 graduates (91%) from the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research since 2003. In this paper grounded theory is used to identify developmental themes in interviews with analysts who have been followed for at least ten years. Recent graduates are negotiating the following challenges: developing a sense of competence, navigating relationships with colleagues and former supervisors as situations change and roles shift, transitioning into becoming mentors, and balancing the competing responsibilities of professional and personal life. Disillusionment about aspects of training, analytic practice, analysis as a treatment, institute politics, and the field in general emerges as a stark reality, despite a high level of career satisfaction. Educational recommendations include making career development opportunities available and providing a realistic view of both practice realities and expectations of analytic treatment outcome.

Psychoanalysis and Interdisciplinarity With Non-analytic Psychotherapeutic Approaches Through the Lens of Dialectics

“…(b) training in many psychoanalytic institutes is essentially non-integrative. Cherry et al ( 2020 ) conducted interviews with 69 graduates from the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research since 2003. It seems that the non-analytic world had little if any place in their psychoanalytic education.…”

Freud and Idealization

“…(2020), and Cherry et al . (2020) in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (volume 68, issue 2). But it has continued to create considerable problems elsewhere.…”

“…In recent years, especially in America, there has been a serious attempt to address the negative consequences of such arrangements (see, for example, the papers by Fritsch and Winer (2020), Richardson et al (2020), and Cherry et al (2020) in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (volume 68, issue 2). But it has continued to create considerable problems elsewhere.…”